Andrew Yang is sooo... close, yet missed the mark.
Submitted by PriceRip on Wed, 03/11/2020 - 7:58pm
Close but no Cigar. (As usual the link will open in a new window.)
Why is it so very difficult to get people to understand the obvious? Universal Basic Income (UBI) doesn't even come close to addressing the systemic issue.
RIP
Comments
I can perhapsee the appeal for young folks but for me to give up
a hard-earned $2600/per month social security check & replace it with $1000/mo. would be nuts. And making up the tax loss with a regressive VAT makes it even worse. I was not a fan of Yang.
chuck utzman
TULSI 2020
Whether or not you were a fan of Yang
...his proposals have nothing to do with your fears about your social security check. You should divorce the two in your own mind.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
You are comparing apples and golf balls
Economies are systems not statistics.
The velocity with which money moves through the entire economy and the level at which money pours into the working economy will dramatically change the outcome of any statistical snapshot.
This requires a commentary.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
The devil
is in the details. Where you inject and where you extract money is the key to the attributes of the society that results.
Monetary flow dynamics are surprisingly (as in: reasonably well) defined by classical differential equations.
RIP
I thought you were referring to Yang's ByeDone endorsement
This move cost my credence in Yang as a political thinker. He would put the whole nation in the hands of a dement. Of course, the PTB will pull all of JoJo's strings as they already are beginning to do. Ah, for the good ol' days when brain damaged Woodrow Wilson sat immobile in the oval office while his missus and Col. House actually ran the government.
UBI was always a scam
It was always too little and too general. To quote Andrew Yang, "Give everybody $1000 a month and they will buy stuff" - all the money will flow straight to the 1% and all "everybody" will get is a lousy t-shirt and a rent increase. The rich get richer and everyone else pays the VAT.
On to Biden since 1973
That's why
I wrote (cryptically) what I wrote and put up the graph that I put up. The discussion that never seems to occur is that the system can be fixed but to do so requires we stop fucking around with all of this extraneous shit.
RIP
Sorry, I'm confused.
The chart you posted shows that since 1943, the amount of personal income tax collected has no correlation with the top marginal rate. Isn't that what Republicans have been claiming for the past 40 years or so?
I don't get what that has to do with UBI.
Too much to write
or digest in one setting …
Taxes remove money from the economic system (or a subset of the economic system) Spending injects money into the economic system (or a subset of the economic system). A combination of these creation and annihilation events defines the structure (or character) of the economic system. When old people like me are trying to tell you why the economy is so messed up we use this graph to illustrate how a large top taxable rate makes for a more socially acceptable economic system. The Republicans lie (surprise!!!) about what the graph means because they don't want you to look behind the curtain and see the Wizard of Oz, working the levers and switches. They just want you to smile, take their word for it all, and stop hurting you head thinking about Reality.
Please, don't take what I have written as the whole of the story! This is just the beginning bit about how Taxes do not fund Spending and the full discussion takes more words.
Andrew Yang is wrong, the UBI won't fix anything. A good (but not the only) place to start is to get that top marginal rate back up to 95% where it belongs. This with several other adjustments will start to fix the inequities and start that process in a very short time. And guess what! Some very fine people (like Warren Buffett) concur with me. Oops, some people around here don't like Warren Buffett, but they are just ignorant … in my opinion.
Each of us has to find our own way to understanding. I started when I was very young, and found learning Quantum Mechanics the best way to explain how the economy really works. Others invented Modern Monetary Theory (a very classical approach) to find their way. My dad?, well he had a very different path that I found very helpful for laying the foundation of understanding.
RIP
Indeed, quantum mechanics is the only thing
...that does work. It's the only thing that can project if- : -then economic outcomes across variables, with any accuracy. The GAO and the CBO need access to a quantum computer, stat.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
95% is good
but not if it ends up being 10-15% by the time it is actually collected. My recollection from the 1960s was the talk about tax loopholes used by rich people to avoid paying the top rates when they were high. What we seem to have now is "we just won't tax you at all" PLUS loopholes so you can get money you didn't pay refunded!
Yes, taxes need to be collected to flatten the inequality, but the actual rate may be immaterial until it is established that taxes actually will be collected. Once the enforcement is in place, then jack the rates up.
It is that old problem that just passing laws doesn't do anything if they aren't enforced.
So let's not pass laws