What are your thoughts on Dem presidential candidate Andrew Yang

UglyCasanova

Lifer
Mar 25, 2001
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...ential-candidate-promising-free-money-for-all

Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur who had stints at a healthcare software startup and the test prep company Manhattan Prep before founding the nonprofit Venture for America, which placed college graduates in startup and venture funding roles in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh.​
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Yang’s platform has its critics, even among progressives. UBI is apparently too out-there for Bernie Sanders, who tends to hem and haw when asked whether he supports it. And while Hillary Clinton flirted with the idea, she ultimately considered it economically infeasible. No other candidate for 2020 has embraced UBI, though many Democrats back a plan to give cash to working-class families. Some leftists have argued that a jobs guarantee—like the one contained in the Green New Deal—is preferable to giving people money for nothing. But Yang worries that creating “a new underclass of government employees who are doing make-work” could be, at worst, “a dystopian nightmare.” Chabot, like Yang, is worried about the proliferation of “bullshit jobs.” And Almaz Zelleke, a political science professor at NYU Shanghai, said that the effects of a jobs guarantee wouldn’t be as sweeping as for UBI.​

I don’t see this guy winning the D slot but I didn’t see Trump winning the R one either but hey apparently things happen. I agree with him on the "guaranteed jobs" bs and it creating a nightmarish scenario of the country becoming dependent on the fed gov to create not needed jobs to pay people with. It would distort the economy and discourage movement of people to areas where jobs are needed. Work is better than no work though I suppose. This didn’t work for the USSR and won’t work for us either. The government is not the answer.

His platform: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/

Reading through I found this:

Laws that prevent employers from retaliating against workers who share salary data, and others that force employers to disclose that information, are band-aids that try to account for the issue on the back-end. The federal government must do more to ensure that anyone performing the same work in substantially similar situations should receive equal pay.​
Fed gov to make employers disclose pay information is his goal, frick that. It would create all sorts of problems. If an employer feels person A brings more to the table than person B for whatever reason they have every right to pay them whatever they negotiate what the person is worth. Making them disclose all people’s salaries would be an absolute nightmare for companies and their HR dept.

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Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
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He has some interesting ideas but won't raise enough money to really make an impact. I think his overall goal isn't to win the nomination but just to try and get into the winners cabinet.
 
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Jaskalas

Lifer
Jun 23, 2004
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If we achieve Basic Income, then Government should !@#$ off when it comes to micro managing labor. Because labor would no longer be for beggars stuck in horrific situations for base survival. Wage disparity is immaterial at that point, particularly if you're looking at forcing equal wages at the high end. Like, who cares what difference people making 6 figures have, they're already massively successful with economic security most Americans can only dream of.

Further protection isn't needed there after we secure the bottom end of the labor market.
 
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HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
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Look past the knee jerk UBI argument to the rationale for it. Yang discusses here.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
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I've heard this guy talk before. He has an episode on the freakonomics podcast that explains who he is and the ideas he brings to the table. His biggest idea is something called a "Freedom dividend" which is basically the government giving everyone 1000 per month or something. The idea is that we all invest in making the US rich and so like investment in a company stock we should all get dividends on our investment (as opposed to currently where the money is only going to the top 1%). If we all get money, then we spend it in the economy as opposed to the uber rich who just find tax havens for it and basically hide it from the economy. Even more so, simply giving a lot of people their "dividend" will offset spending elsewhere like incarceration costs, healthcare costs, retirement costs etc etc that the government is already spending by his calculations.There are some other ideas he has about how to tax uber corporations like google and address job losses that are occurring through automation. Anyway, it's interesting stuff but I get the sense he really is just in it to eventually make it into a cabinet position rather than win the whole thing (a la Ben Carson).
 
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Mar 11, 2004
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Unless he suddenly gets a ton of money to put into a campaign, he'll be a fringe candidate at best and won't likely even make it into serious primary consideration (so won't be in primary debates). I don't know enough about him to know if he's serious about political office or if he's just trying to get his ideas out.

Sometime I should look into the specifics of what his plan is and how it differs from other similar ideas.

I'd be surprised if anyone remembers his name by the time the primaries roll around.

We'll see. Depends if the right wing propaganda machine wants to point to him to smear liberals. My guess is his specific ideas will be lost in the fog of the GOP trying to trash basic income as the shackles of communism or some such. If he were to get consideration for cabinet position then I expect we'll get more targeted campaign to declare him some radical that is trying to make us like Venezuela.