I read your link, and I'm sorry, but Yang is a politician making promises he knows he cannot fulfill.
At the question of how he will we pay for this UBI ,(he calls it the Freedom Dividend) It says..
Andrew proposes funding the Freedom Dividend by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value Added Tax of 10 percent.
Think clearly now. The working citizen is going to lose his social benefits, AND get his taxes increased!
You cry, "no", his social benefits are just replaced with the UBI. Even if that were true, and it isn't, the citizen would simply be taxed 10% more than he is being taxed now. That's all. And the extra tax must be larger than his UBI!
So the government will tax everyone working, and then gave the same people back a portion of what they took.
Basically, every working person will be making less than they were before UBI. Yet Yang says, "putting money in the hands of consumers stimulates the economy."
But he isn't putting money in the hands of consumers. He's taking money away from consumers!. Its a shell game!
He answers every question in this oily politician way. When asked if his UBI plan would increase immigration to the US, he answers that America is already the preferred destination of immigrants!
Yeah! That's exactly why the question was asked in the first place! And then to show how dumb he thinks his supporters are, he says only citizens would receive the UBI anyway. Never disclosing that he is FOR open borders and granting citizenship to all immigrants!
How sleazy!
All we need to know is basic math. UBI schemes have failed the world over. It is simply socialism by a catchy name. And socialism fails because it destroys incentive in the population.
Here are economic facts we cannot escape.
1. An increase in taxes will depreciate economic growth. Econ 101.
2. A UBI will increase the amount of unemployed people in a society.
3. A UBI requires the wealth to be generated. But only some of the people will be wealth generators. That means the wealth generated by each working citizen will have to be more than his UBI!
Why would citizens support Yang when right now, they can keep all the extra wealth they generate?
And what is the incentive to generate more than your UBI when you won't get it anyway? That is exactly why socialism loses and collapses every time.
Please, look up ponzi schemes and educate yourself. I know you mean well, but the experts at economic science agree that the UBI is nonsense.
Now, the ratio of working to not working will make a huge difference. So let's put some actual numbers in. Yang has proposed a $1,000 dollars a month, and a 10% vat tax.
1. Do you know how much will be generated per person by this vat tax a year? It will have to be much more than $12,000 dollars a year per person!
Can most people making less than 30,000 to $50,000 a year afford afford a $20,000 tax bite? And most people do make less than $50,000 a year.
2. Do you know what the minimum ratio of working to not working must be for UBI to work? What is the unemployment rate in the US right now?
We can fill in some numbers and Yang's illogic will immediately be apparent.
One last thing. The excuse that the samples in Finland and Canada were too small, is dishonest. In each of those countries, the number of people receiving doles was limited, while the number of working people generating the wealth was not.
The plan did not fail because it ran out of money, it failed because both countries found that the UBI increased joblessness among the recipients, made periods of joblessness longer, and decreased the amount of tax gathered by the government from the generators of wealth.
The governments plainly saw that if the entire working class could not sustain the few they had on the plan within their economic constraints, a larger sample of recipients would make it even worse.
You tax a wealth generator, and he reduces his expenditures. This reduces VAT collected. Each month, the amount gathered to cover the unemployed becomes smaller.
The government will be forced to either increase taxes, which will further decrease vat gathered, or reduce the UBI, which will contradict the purpose of the UBI.
This is what economists in Canada and Finland saw, and it caused those governments to scrap the programs.
When politicians start using catchy slogans for their shell games, watch out! It isn't a dividend if it's coming out of your pocket.
