Andrew Yang Explains How His Plan For Universal Basic Income Would Work; Complains His Microphone Was 'Not On' at Times During Democratic Debate (youtube.com) 432
Andrew Yang, who says he's running "the nerdiest campaign in presidential history," made an almost immediate splash when he arrived without a tie on the second night of the first presidential Democratic debate. The former head of Venture for America, a nonprofit that sends entrepreneurs into cities to help revitalize them, Yang brought his passion to the stage on how to deal with economic disruption and a universal basic income for all Americans. This is how he thinks UBI would work in America: "Oh, so it's difficult to do if you have companies like Amazon, trillion-dollar tech companies, paying literally zero in taxes while they're closing 30 percent of our stores. We'd save money on things like incarceration, homelessness services, emergency room health care, and just the value gains from having a stronger, healthier, mentally healthier population would increase GDP by $700 billion. Yang thinks his proposals for UBI and a value-added tax will help those at the bottom end of the income spectrum readjust to the changing economy. He added: "We automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and we are about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck-driving jobs and other jobs through the economy," he said. But the debate did not go as planned for Yang, who complained that there were few times when his mic was not on. He said: "There were also a few times, FYI, where I just started talking, being like, 'Hey, I want to add something there,' and my mic was not on," Yang said while speaking to supporters after the event. "And it's this sort of thing where, it's not like if you started talking, it takes over the [conversation]. It's like I was talking, but nothing was happening. And it was like, 'Oh f---.' So that happened a bit too."
NO man, (Score:2, Interesting)
That mic was off on purpose.
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its common sense and standard practice to shut mics off that arent being used. if its not your turn to speak, don't expect to be heard
Not so much these days with everybody moving talking head events to automixers. Most follow Dan Dugan's automix algorithm or a derivative thereof for handling multiple open mics without having to mute ones not in use and, basically, turn it into an automated process. Especially with the popularity of reasonably cheap digital mixers like the Behringer X-Airs, it's not hard to conceive of them setting automix and forgetting it type thing.
Re:NO man, (Score:5, Informative)
I was a professional live sound engineer for nearly 20 years. I can assure you this is not the case for a panel event such as the one in question.
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That would be reasonable if they'd shut everybody's mic off when it wasn't their turn. But they didn't. As far as I've heard only Yang's was ever turned off.
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make up your mind (Score:2, Insightful)
The former head of a private non profit that sends entrepreneurs into areas that need employment and economic activity wants government to provide all the answers, including money for not working? Make up your mind, man, are you a Marxist or not?
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Re:make up your mind (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent is currently modded funny, but I think some people may not get why.
In American politics, the word "welfare" has become a derogatory term meaning "money given to freeloaders who don't want to work." The term conjures the image of a lazy drug-user who sits in their couch and cheats the system to get free money. This is not the definition of welfare, which really means to "the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group." The US constitution grants the government the power and responsibility to "promote the general welfare" in both the preamble and in the body of the constitution.
While both major parties in America support welfare, they support it for different groups. The Republicans want welfare for the elderly and veterans, who typically vote Republican. The Democrats want welfare for the poor and disabled, who typically vote Democrat. The Republicans can use the American political definition of welfare to claim that they don't support welfare, and welfare is for bad people
colonslash has pointed out that UBI plans don't just pay the poor, they pay everyone. So by the American definition of "welfare" UBI is not "welfare." Outside of the US, this statement would make no sense.
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US version of UBI: A method to keep the democrats in power forever and ever. What the government can give you, it can also threaten to take away if the other team gets elected.
The outcome of this idiocy will just be more inflation, higher unemployment, and even greater income disparity. As the economy crumbles, keeping the system afloat will mean increasing the UBI -- which will require constantly increasing taxes on the ever diminishing remnant of the productive parts of the economy.
The US became the st
Re:make up your mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the reason why this is considered necessary, as stated even in the summary. Huge trillion dollar companies paying net zero in taxes, who are also putting existing companies out of business. So many business have had to shut their doors because they can't compete against Amazon and Wal-Mart. What sort of businesses seem to be on the rise? The Dollar stores (Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, etc), because those companies cater to lower income shoppers and are able to undercut even Wal-Mart in some cases. A bad economy means that the discount stores get a boost. In a lot of small towns you see the downtown area drying up because you can't make a living trying to undercut the Wal-Mart. In larger cities the malls and strip malls can't compete with Amazon so that jobs are vanishing there as well.
All because we're really bad at taxing enormously profitable companies and having them pay their fair share. Taxes are for the little people.
Re:make up your mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Huge trillion dollar companies paying net zero in taxes,
According to the numbers I find here [france24.com], Amazon did not make a trillion dollars last year, they had a pre-tax income of $11.2 billion (two orders of magnitude less), and paid $1.2 billion in "cash taxes paid". Much of that was to the states and local areas, which just happen to be where schools and roads and police and fire are funded from.
Paying nothing on certain categories of money doesn't mean they paid nothing overall, were that even true. It also ignores the taxes paid by the companies they do business with (many of which exist to sell through Amazon and would otherwise not be profitable at all), and the people who have jobs because they are employed by Amazon. It also ignores the difference between "income" and "profit", the latter of which is what is taxed.
And the problem is not with Amazon, but with the laws that tell them how much they are required to pay. Only a fool pays more in taxes than they are required to, and successful companies are not run by fools. (Successful families are not, either.)
Re:make up your mind (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true that they're paying that they legally owe, and any smart company figures out how to legally pay the least amount of taxes. The fault isn't with Amazon and Walmart, but with the tax system that provides easy ways to skip taxes. Note that many small and medium sized business don't have such ready access to loopholes that really large companies have and may show a relatively larger tax rate.
Saying that taxes are paid via payroll is not saying much at all. That's often a pittance compared to the enormous profits that a major corporation makes, especially a corporation that employes large numbers of low paid workers. It's like saying that Rich Uncle Moneybags doesn't need to pay taxes because he hires a full set of cooks, gardeners, drivers, maintenance workers, cleaning staff, security guards, and a butler, all of whom pay taxes.
What Walmart does when they move into many disadvantaged areas is that they put other stores out of business. Especially the Walmarts with a grocery section. On top of that, the local municipalities often give them a tax break because Walmart promised them tons of jobs (that never realy pans out). If the local government doesn't like that plan, Walmart has been known to build their stores just outside of the town limits. And Walmart will undercut the local prices for a time. The net effect is that more people shop at Walmart for the lower prices, the other stores can't compete and shut down, and overall fewer people are employed in the area. Sure, it's just plain old capitalism in a raw form but it's not good for the local economy.
Similarly, the existence of Amazon seriously impacts other stores, especially brick and mortar stores. There may not even be local employees from Amazon and the only local people benefiting are those doing deliveries and the customer who doesn't have to leave the basement and go out into the sunlight. It's a drag on the economies.
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The issue, is that these companies maul congressmen/women with lobbyists to avoid tax reform, and collude to prevent any reasonable discussion about tax reform (as it relates to companies), because they invent a swan-song about how if the taxes go up, they will just not be profitable and it will be the end of the economy, and everyone will lose their shirts, and it will be the apocalypse, and all that horse shit.
It's fine to say that the problem is with the current rules being permissive.
It is NOT fine to s
Re:make up your mind (Score:4, Informative)
It's about ten percent of revenue
It's one half of one percent of revenue, Amazon had $232 billion in revenue in 2018. And again: that $1.2 billion is only what they paid to various governments (mostly foreign), it does not include what they got from various governments in the form of tax benefits.
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because giving it to companies to create more jobs hopefully creates even more jobs, giving it to me for pot, i mean have at it, thanks for the free weeds and mcdicks? lol
I like Yang because he is data driven and willing to try things that we haven't tried before, whereas most others want to pay lip service to change while maintaining the status quo. If Yang won, started his UBI plan, and it looked like it was going to be a complete failure, I believe he would scrap the idea as soon as possible and try something new. With any other politician, I believe they'd die on that hill. For example, imagine someone showed Trump incontrovertible evidence that building a wall would som
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I like Yang because he is data driven and willing to try things that we haven't tried before,
When you work in computing services, one of the first lessons you learn, if you are allowed to manage things without someone telling you what not to do, is DO NOT CHANGE PRODUCTION SYSTEMS UNTIL YOU TEST TEST TEST ON A TEST PLATFORM. This has a direct mapping into the economy of the USA. (It is also a problem that Microsoft has taught us via their mandatory OS updates for W10.)
Being willing to try things with a production economy, especially things that can be easily predicted to break it horribly, is not
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Calling someone a Marxist is usually a sign that the speaker doesn't know what they are talking about, and in this case the rule applies.
Marx wouldn't give people money for not working. Marxists certainly don't believe in that.
Re: Learn to read, GOP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Per capita federal revenue (in constant dollars) has been rising for a long time, tripling or more over the last few decades. Spending has just been rising faster.
There isn't a tax/revenue problem with the federal government. The problem is Congress keeps spending even more than the fed's income has been going up.
Need to cut spending. There's no reason per person inflation-adjusted government spending needs to rise every year when the government isn't doing anything more useful to justify it.
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No one is stopping you and whatever friends you may have from starting a worker-owned corporation along the lines you describe in the U.S.
The only thing that stops you is human nature and economic reality. Both of those doom Marxism to failure, as demonstrated over and over again.
If he was a REAL nerd (Score:4, Funny)
He'd have taken care of that "microphone not being on" issue himself.
Re:If he was a REAL nerd (Score:4, Funny)
He'd have taken care of that "microphone not being on" issue himself.
Warren could have fixed that for him, if she was there - she has a plan.
Re:If he was a REAL nerd (Score:5, Funny)
A woman, a plan, a canal - Panamowa.
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
It really doesn't matter. The next Democratic nominee will be Biden and if he goes against Trump he will lose and Trump will be our next president. I dislike Trump, but that is the way it is.
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Just like... (Score:2)
Just like Jeb Bush got the Republican nomination?
There's a loooong race still to run and it's not at all uncommon in the nomination process for some one to jump to a large lead early on only to not get the nomination in the end.
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It's not impossible for someone other than Biden to win, but the stars have to align.
You vastly overestimate the predictive power of polling this far from the election without an incumbent Democrat. In recent memory, they were only right in 2016. They were wrong in 2008, 2004, 2000, 1992, 1988 and 1976.
Re:Just like... (Score:4, Informative)
How were they right in 2016?
They accurately predicted Clinton as the nominee. You appear to be confusing 2016 with 2018.
The "blue wave" was much smaller than expected
Only if you're the media attempting to call it while 1/3rd of the elections were still outstanding because it's getting to midnight Eastern and The Narrative must be set!!
Once all the votes were actually counted, it ended up being the largest House swing to the Democrats since Watergate, and the Democrats held on to two Senate seats they were supposed to lose.
Re:Just like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like Jeb Bush got the Republican nomination?
The Republicans dont rig their primary. The Democrats do. Full stop.
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You're a tool. Clinton, Carter, and Obama were all big time underdogs at this point in the nomination process. https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.... [nytimes.com] .
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Biden is too old and too white and too straight and too cis and too male to win the new DNC base.
Biden is too old and too gropey to win in general.
I still suspect the script is to let this shit show go on for a bit longer, then just when they're tearing eachother's throats out HRC will swoop in, announce she's going to run again, and the party will magically unify behind her. (And she'll still lose.)
If the DNC has anything going for it, it's the fact that they're in this ruined state during a reelection ye
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Biden is too old and too white and too straight and too cis and too male to win the new DNC base.
And yet he was fresh and new and full of the right stuff when Obama selected him as part of the "Change we can believe in" team. Did he not age well over the last three years?
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Wrong, it's Warren (Score:2)
The next Democratic nominee will be Biden
You don't read the Dems very well do you, the long knives are out for Biden and have been for some time.
Warren is the pre-ordained winner, just as Hillary was...
It's a pretty simple tell, just look at who does not get negative press.
Re:Wrong, it's Warren (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do you want a second Trump term? Because the only way you're preventing that is with President Biden. Bernie and Warren stand no chance and should just drop out already. Biden is the only Democratic candidate that can speak to Trump voters and win their votes. No other Democratic candidate is willing to do that.
The Democrat's best chance is Biden/Harris, although I'm afraid Harris might have killed her chances of that ticket last night. Bernie and Warren are weights pulling the Democratic party down and need to be gotten rid of ASAP, unless you want a second Trump term.
That's what people thought about Hillary: that she was more electable than Bernie. Only problem: they assumed that they could force disaffected Dem voters to the polls after cheating them of their favorite candidate. Other than Trump, only Bernie had comparable support since both were running on similar themes in either party and demonstrating for the first time a horizontal rather than a vertical split: b/w elitists vs the working class, as opposed to the traditional Left vs Right
I still think Bernie i
Biden's already plummeting in the polls (Score:2)
Biden literally can't campaign. Ever time he speaks he puts his foot in his mouth. He already said, in just a few short weeks:
1. A well known racists member of Congress was a good man because he never called him "boy" (to which everyone in America rolled their eyes and said, "No Shit?").
2. "Nothing Will Fundamentally Ch
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Because the polling was so accurate last time around, right?
He Is Right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:He Is Right (Score:5, Informative)
Poor schooling, poor food, social stigma point that child into drugs, alcohol, crime and unemployment.
You forgot the most important one:
Bad Parents.
Re:He Is Right (Score:4, Insightful)
And those bad parents are the product of their own generation's poor schooling, poor food and social stigma (at least, on average).
It's not like history started today.
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(at least, on average)
There's a third option (Score:2, Insightful)
We're already starting to do this near the boarder. 42% of voters are completely indifferent to children fleeing the violence we caused in El Salvador being l
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Nope (Score:2)
I'm against that actually (Score:2)
If you'd spend a little time on google you'd find out that countries where abortion is illegal have the same rates of abortion as countries where it's legal. How do we know this? It's relatively easy for a statistician to suss that out from the population numbers, birth rates and other statistics. Kinda like how we can measure things at a sub atomic
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If a homeless man shows up at the ER for literally any issue, his medical care is "free" - he just won't pay the bill. That's the elephant in the room - if you're poor, you end up not paying the bill and the hospital writes off the debt. Their credit is ruined (if they could even get the social from the homeless person), but, realistically that is the least of their worries. Not saying it's right/wrong - just pointing out that's the reality. The reason for "universal healthcare" is just so that hospitals ge
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If a homeless man shows up at the ER for literally any issue, his medical care is "free" - he just won't pay the bill.
No, the medical care that will keep him from dying right now is "free". In the vast majority of cases, there's follow-up care after the ER to properly recover. And he won't get that.
And then people will call him a lazy ass for not spending all day walking on his now-bad leg, 'cause he's clearly trying to just defraud the Good Hardworking People (tm).
Among the reasons for universal healthcare is so that he actually gets that follow-up care and recovers.
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I get your point but you are missing something important.
a broken leg. The immediate medical expenses total about 3K. Now we did have a choice. We could have purchased and provided a full insurance policy that would be cheaper than 3K a year.
Insurance doesn't make medical expenses cheaper - it makes them more expensive. It might be cheaper for the individual, but for the whole it is more. So then why do we want everyone to have medical insurance?
Try this example: a homeless man shows up at the local ER with a blood infection. He has the blood infection because he never went to the doctor for a minor infection he picked-up. It went untreated because he didn't go to the doctor for the S
VAT vs. UBI question was dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
I found the question from the moderator asking if the proposed VAT would eat up the gains from the UBI to be remarkably idiotic. As did Yang, judging by the look on his face.
This stuff isn't hard.
If I raise your taxes by $100 but give you back $1k in refunds, you come out ahead. Under Yang's scheme, well more than half of people would come out ahead. Only high income people would not.
Re: VAT vs. UBI question was dumb (Score:3, Insightful)
Please. Where does the over $3.5 Trillion per year come from again? Oh, that's not important?
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Yang managed to compress an actual answer to that question in what little time he was given to speak. His team has calculated that they need to raise some of it from taxes (they like a VAT) and some of it will come indirectly from existing taxes generating higher revenue than before due to additional GDP growth that is downstream from the UBI scheme.
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some of it will come indirectly from existing taxes generating higher revenue than before due to additional GDP growth that is downstream from the UBI scheme
Ah yes, trickle up economics. If you give people UBI, just like any other stimulus package it will be saved or used to pay off debt. It will not be spent on things you want to tax.
Until the masses are economically stable and out of debt, you're not going to trickle up. You're going to cause inflation and wage suppression, further enslaving the lower class to the government teat and further choking out the middle class and encouraging them to bail out of the broken system.
Re: VAT vs. UBI question was dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
If you give the money to the poor and debt constrained, they are going to be the ones who spend it. The lack of economic stability makes it more likely for them to spend the money given to them for consumption, not less. Tax cuts for the rich who aren't debt constrained are the ones who are just going to pad their bank accounts with the proceeds, at best they will invest it. Padding investment instead of consumption could be more desirable in some situations, but it really doesn't seem to be the case in the current economic climate, where we are at the tail end of a boom with too much easy money flowing around looking for too little supply of genuinely worthwhile investments. That's the sort of thing that leads to speculative bubbles.
The real argument against it would be if we were in the world of half a century ago where inflation was major problem, as if you stimulate too hard with spending or tax benefits like UBI it would be eaten up by inflation lead to higher interest rates. Do you honestly think we are in a situation where we really need to jack up interest rates a bunch?
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I found the question from the moderator asking if the proposed VAT would eat up the gains from the UBI to be remarkably idiotic. As did Yang, judging by the look on his face.
This stuff isn't hard.
If I raise your taxes by $100 but give you back $1k in refunds, you come out ahead. Under Yang's scheme, well more than half of people would come out ahead. Only high income people would not.
It's true that it isn't hard, but open borders / mass immigration directly conflicts with UBI. You can have mass immigration or you can have nice things but you absolutely cannot have both. If you don't believe me then you don't understand the scale. Here's a fun video for understanding the scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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what are you calling "high income"?
Back in the 80's, when I attended an expensive university, the students from California all complained that did couldn't qualify for financial aid, because the value of their single family home was way to high.
In 2020, lots of folks from California will be shocked to learn that the value of their houses + 401Ks qualifies them to be "high income".
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The average retiree pulls in more money from all sources than the average worker paying into SS does. As SS is legally a welfare progam i.e. a transfer of money from current taxlayers* to current recipients, and not actually a savings plan, the net effect is a wealth transfer from lower to higher income.
* And future workers as the "lock box" is already spent on other government items and when due, will just be borrowed onto the deficit.
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In 2020, lots of folks from California will be shocked to learn that the value of their houses + 401Ks qualifies them to be "high income".
Value of a house and money in a 401k is not "income". It cannot contribute to any designation of "high" or "low" income.
Financial aid qualification is based more than on just income, it is based on ability to pay, where parents' "value of house" and "401K" are considered. Perhaps it should not be, but that's how it works.
You're mixing apples and oranges.
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Better than 75% of the country isn't "high income"? WTF are you smoking man?
Your idea of high income seems to be "anything higher than what I make".
To someone who makes $20k a year, $81k is rich as fuck.
Re:VAT vs. UBI question was dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who earns less than you is lazy.
Anyone who earns more than you doesn't deserve it.
Anyone who donates less than you is stingy.
Anyone who donates more than you is a fool being parted from his money.
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Anyone who weighs less than you is anorexic.
Re:VAT vs. UBI question was dumb (Score:5, Informative)
> the "top 25%" are those having AGI of $81K or more.
Well no.
The average income for the "top 25%" of household tax returns is ~$80K.
The top 50% have an AGI of ~$40K or more
The top 25% have an AGI of ~$80K or more
The top 10% have an AGI of ~$139K or more
The top 5% have an AGI of ~$197K or more
The top 1% has an AGI of ~$480K or more
( Source: https://taxfoundation.org/summ... [taxfoundation.org] )
These are the "Income split point" numbers, meaning you have to be earning at least that much to fall into that category. Hence "or more."
So by expanding the range to "Top 25%" you are including so many relatively low income households that you bring the average way, way down... it hides the true magnitude of the disparity.
BTW if you live in the US and earn more than $40K in taxable income congrats, you're officially making more than half the country. So yes it's fair to say that, in relative terms, $80K/yr in taxable income is "high" income.
> at that point and above already pay 87% the income taxes
As well they should, considering they own over 90% of the wealth. The top 1% owns about 40% of all the wealth (cash + assets) and they contribute under 20% of all taxes. The top 5% owns 67% of all the wealth and only contributes 35% of tax revenue. If wealth is the lifesblood of the economy, these people are akin to a tumor starving the rest of the body.
=Smidge=
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the "top 25%" are those having AGI of $81K or more.
Well no. The average income for the "top 25%" of household tax returns is ~$80K. The top 50% have an AGI of ~$40K or more The top 25% have an AGI of ~$80K or more
Uhh, you just duplicated what he said after claiming he was wrong. And contradicting yourself. Is the AVERAGE of the top 25% $80k or is it $80k or more?
Are you quibbling over the $1k difference in a statistical value? Really?
> at that point and above already pay 87% the income taxes
As well they should, considering they own over 90% of the wealth
You are conflating "wealth" with "income". The two are not the same. If 25% of the people pay 87% of the taxes, then they are paying more than three times their fair share. Or you can claim that someone on welfare is not getting any value from the system, such as police, fire, roads, e
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But taxing wealth is not what income taxes are about. It should not be about that
There's no problem with it, we do it all the time. Property taxes are a wealth tax.
Talking but nothing happening (Score:4, Funny)
How is this tech news? (Score:2)
I mean, get real.
It's about UBI (Score:3)
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Um, dude, there was this grandpa guy who wrote Sci-Fi about this back when I was a kid. So it's not new.
I really like Yang but... (Score:2)
I like Yang quite a lot, I was really hoping he'd be the nominee as I would probably vote for him.
One thing that really disturbed me in the debates though, was that he said Russia was a much bigger threat than China - so wrong...
I saw someone tweet that said Yang didn't get to say much during the debate, so he was kind of the winner by default as he had less to say that turned people off...
Mostly the Democratic debates seem to be a big hole digging competition.
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One thing that really disturbed me in the debates though, was that he said Russia was a much bigger threat than China - so wrong...
We can afford to treat both of them as our friends.
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His plan is to end safety net programs (Score:3)
UBI is not a bad idea, Yang's implementation of it is terrible. It's what you get when a centrist tries to do post capitalism. Half measures don't work for radical changes. The establishment is too powerful for that.
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That's a big reason they're in poverty to begin with.
[Citation Required]
Or you could realize that minimum wage being set to half of the purchasing power of minimum wage in the 1960s might reduce purchasing power even when the person receiving the money is "responsible".
(I eagerly await your claim that minimum wage is for "kids" of some flavor, at which point you'll be surprised to learn the median age of a minimum wage worker is in their 30s.)
Re:His plan is to end safety net programs (Score:5, Informative)
some people will use their UBI to buy drugs, just like they are currently using their welfare (if you think the fact that it's regulated means you can't use them to buy drugs you're out of your mind
So, a whole lot of people jumped on this bandwagon a while ago. The result was a few states passing legislation to drug-test TANF recipients (welfare no longer exists, btw). So now we have some actual data on drug use of these people.
The result: They're not using illegal drugs. Or at least, they are using drugs at a much, much, much, much lower rate than the rest of the population.
It turns out illegal drugs are expensive, and the extremely poor don't have money.
UBI is just too expensive without trimming others (Score:2)
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Government programs where no one even bothers to check to see if an individual qualifies. Millionaires getting food stamps and such.
OK now some fun math, current federal budget is about 4.2 trillion. Current population, lets say 320 million (no one knows or is bothering to count) individuals in the US. 320,000,000 * 12,00
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OK now some fun math
Your math is utterly illogical. You don't seem to know what a VAT is, for example.
AI will destroy all the jobs. (Score:2)
Just like the Industrial Revolution did.
But let's destroy the economy preventatively, just in case.
LMAO! WILL NOT WORK (Score:2)
No work, all play (Score:2)
Then throw in reparations, "free" college for all, wipe out student loans, expand "medicare for all"....
boom goes the budget, the world goes off the dollar standard, a depression worse then the 1929/30 hits - and it's toast....
straight answer,,, phuq no.
Free money for everyone if you vote for me! (Score:2)
It's the final stage of a dying democracy.
I suppose I could add a quip or scathing remark, but really, I can't think of a sadder thing than to see this happen during my lifetime. Goodbye America with your amazing ideals, you had a good run. Be at peace as you go gently into the night.
Amazon & Taxes (Score:3)
"Oh, so it's difficult to do if you have companies like Amazon, trillion-dollar tech companies, paying literally zero in taxes"
Amazon paid zero in federal US income tax in 2018 because they made great use of the R&D tax credit and a tax credit for stock grants to employees. Literally billions of dollars of both.
Amazon tops the list of U.S. companies in R&D spend, at $22.6 billion.
The stock grant tax credit is particularly interesting, because Amazon made it available even to blue collar workers...until the "fight for $15" people made them raise the base wage, and Amazon stopped offering the stock grants to most blue collar workers and just paid them more cash instead. So for 2019, Amazon will likely make less stock grants to employees to count against their profit for tax purposes.
Did Yang say he wanted to do away with the R&D tax credit? Or do away with stock grant credits? Because that would be an easy way to make Amazon pay more in US federal income taxes.
Amazon did pay $1.18 billion in cash for income taxes last year, much of that likely outside the US. What is less clear is how much Amazon contributed to local sales taxes in the US, my hunch is in the tens of billions of $, but they are not required to report that to the SEC.
and benefit cliffs just lead to people not wanting (Score:3)
and benefit cliffs just lead to people not wanting to work more.
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Only a tech millionaire venture capitalist thinks everything is about money. ...
The stupidest thing about UBI is that we'd waste all that money on just giving it away.
Not sure how to square these two statements. If wasting money automatically damning of an idea, then in effect money is the most important thing in that scenario. The idea behind UBI is not that it is somehow economically efficient, any more than the idea behind national defense is that it is economically efficient. The idea is that it accomplishes something important that the markets won't even attempt to do.
I suspect there will come a time when it makes sense, as automation takes over more and more job
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Fuck you pal, I'm not that old.
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Revenue != Profit.
All you would do with that scheme is put millions of people out of work as those companies completely folded because they would not be able to pay for any debts, wages, or other operating costs that a company has to deal with.
Congratulations, you've taken all the employees of those companies from somewhere above the poverty line straight to extreme poverty to pay part of the cost of UBI for what, a year?
Way to go genius.
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Thanks for the math ... unfortunately, it points the finger at the fact that it takes $5E12 to run the federal government for a single year. Kind of makes you think about what the next step is.
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Cancelling the entire defense department will save ~$700 billion a year. That won't even balance the budget in half the years of the past decade, much less cover new extravigances.
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Re:Let's do some math (Score:4, Informative)
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And yet it's a fact that we have more homes (Score:2)
That wealth is going somewhere. The only question is where. There's a giant hole in our civilizations income. I'd like to see some real effort into finding out where that hole is. Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren seem about ready to start looking.
Re:Let's do some math (Score:5, Informative)
What are you on about? The vast majority of that federal budget you're talking about is already paid for. Federal revenue in 2018 was around ~$3t. That's not a one time asset seizure, that's more or less what we collect every year. Deficits lately have been in the ~$700b range on roughly $4t of federal spending.
If we want to close the deficit and/or find money for new spending on top of that, all we have to do is drum up another one or two trillion in additional recurring revenue, which isn't even remotely as hard to do as you're making it sound. U.S. GDP is ~$20t. Federal spending is currently around 20% of GDP.
If we upped the tax revenue to GDP ratio to 30%, there's your extra two trillion in tax revenue. Up it to 40% and you can double the federal budget. Even at 40%, we'd still be spending less on the federal budget as a percentage of GDP as Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.
The money is out there if we're willing to tax it.
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much like many welfare recipients already do.
I always take political advice from people who don't know this was eliminated in the 1980s. And then welfare itself was eliminated in the 1990s, replaced with a 5-year-limited system.
It demonstrates just how little they pay attention to anything other than their boogeymen.
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