I hear a lot of people who are moderates, independents, or even some conservatives say that Andrew Yang is the smartest and most reasonable guy on the Democratic primary stage right now.
He may be, but he’s still a blithering ideological idiot.
I don’t care how he’s supposed to be some tech entrepreneur genius, he’s a macroeconomics moron.
Frequent readers of this blog know that I have taken his UBI to task. It won’t make people better, it will subsidize indolence and rob people of their motivation and dignity. Assuming it doesn’t cause hyperinflation and collapse the value of our dollar, what does paying a person $12,000 per year do. A person working minimum wage full time is making $14,500 pre-deductions.
So how many minimum wage people would quit working or quit working full time to be idle and live off their UBI?
The idea that people would still work full time and then have a combined income of $26,500 per year (pre deductions) is fantasy and not reflective of how humans really behave. A UBI would be a disaster, and it has been everywhere it has been tried on the small scale.
But there are two clips I saw last night of him at a town hall that really nailed just how dumb he is on macroeconomics.
Andrew Yang: The goal of our climate plan is to make it so we don’t “own our own cars” pic.twitter.com/ucN0cowjVl
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 19, 2019
First of all, government control of our ability to travel freely is a massive restriction on our rights. I agree with the great Iowahawk, we need a Second Amendment for cars. The great Bill Whittle did a wonderful video about how the car is freedom and restricting car ownership restricts freedom (watch it, it’s excellent).
Those are good points but this is post about economics.
Yang demonstrates his total lack of knowledge of the Tragedy of the Commons. In a nutshell, people don’t value and take care of things they don’t own.
When nobody owns a car and we all share in a fleet of vehicles, who will care about keeping them clean or running? Nobody. That fleet of self-driving cars will make the NYC subway system look clean. It will be the biggest waste of money as those vehicles are turned, very quickly, into sel driving dumpsters.
Then there was this clip:
.@AndrewYang says beef should include the cost of cows’ “emissions” so that it becomes so expensive people stop eating it. pic.twitter.com/ZoDtCp0fT5
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 19, 2019
Let us crunch some numbers. The US is responsible for less than 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Only 9% of US greenhouse gasses come from agriculture, and only 42% of all agriculture emissions come from animal agriculture.
Put that all together and 42% of 9% of 15% is 0.57%. Less than six-tenths of one percent of global greenhouse gases come from all US animal agriculture. Being generous, let’s say that beef is half of US animal agriculture, which is three-tenths of one percent of global greenhouse gases.
According to the USDA, the Beef industry was worth $67 Billion in 2018. The meat industry as a whole was worth $864 Billion, or 6% of the American GDP. The meat industry employs half a million people directly and more than six million including distributors and others.
So Yang here wants to make meat, especially beef, more expensive, perhaps prohibitively expensive for working-class Americans, over greenhouse gases.
To put numbers to it, he wants to put hundreds of thousands to millions of Americans out of work, disrupt a near trillion-dollar segment of our economy, and make life more miserable for many, many people all to slightly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of an industry that is right now responsible for a fraction of a percent of global greenhouse emissions.
That is bullshit.
This guy is an economic clown. He may know how to make himself rich in tech, but in terms of macroeconomics, his a fucking idiot.
“I hear a lot of people who are moderates, independents, or even some conservatives say that Andrew Yang is the smartest and most reasonable guy on the Democratic primary stage right now.”
Low bar.
The problem here is that everyone proposing this stuff is convinced that negative impacts will not happen.
Put the ranchers and the meat processors out of business, and all the workers there will just get a different job. In fact, they are convinced that the new job will pay more. Same thing with the petroleum business, etc… All these workers displaced will suddenly find more gainful employment.
Universal basis income or publicly owned cars will only work if the people receiving/using them act exactly like the progressives assume they will act. If you buy a new car, you generally take care of it, so why would you not take care of a nice new car that you share with strangers? (Here’s a tip… look at they way people leave their seat area on an airplane, especially after a long flight.)
Or the UBI dream. If you pay someone enough to get by, why would they not want to have a job as well, so that they can do even better???? For every person who recognizes this as an opportunity to increase their standard of living, there are thousands that will see it as an opportunity to do nothing and still get by.
Oh, that’s right. The government is already paying me a basic living wage, if the cost of living goes up, I am sure the basic living wage will go up as well…
Proof? Look at the welfare system in the US. One of the complaints about welfare is that if the person receiving it gets any kind of job the payments stop. They have to be unemployable, so to speak. Someone gets $1,000 a month welfare is not going to get a part time job that pays $100 a week and see their overall income drop by $600 a month. Give me a “basic living wage” every month, and I guarantee that I will never have a job that “on the books.”
Finally, what is the real, yearly cost of UBI? $12,000 a person per year. Tell you what, multiply that by the population. $3,720,000,000,000 (check my math on that one, I am doing it in my head). That is $3.72 TRILLION dollars a year. Estimated total tax revenue for 2020 is expected to be around $3.6T. So, maybe I am wrong here, but if the cost of UBI exceeds total tax revenue collected, how exactly will we be able to fund anything except UBI? A Value Added Tax (VAT) maybe?
Where is that solution?
He’s not a tech entrepreneur at all. He likes to act as if he were some Silicon Valley tech wizard, but if you read his bio (see Wikipedia for example) you can see that it’s partly lawyer, partly philanthropy bureaucrat, and partly test prep company manager.
He doesn’t know about tech because he’s never been any part of it.
Something that I’ve never seen addressed, and that no one who is used to uber showing up in 2 minutes would even think about.
I am smart enough to not live in a crowded city, and I don’t want to wait 45 minutes for the robo-car to come pick me up to go run errands in town or go to work.
The only people who ever talk about turning the U.S. into a car-less society are folks that live in New York City or San Francisco and consider their weekend trip to Seattle to have been a rugged excursion to the wilderness.
I live in inner northeast / north Portland. I can walk to work, have ready access to major bus routes, and there’s a good light rail network within a short hop. Plus Uber, Lyft, Car2Go, traditional taxis, rent-a-scooters, and rent-a-bikes… I don’t own a car. My husband does, since he has to travel out of the city and out of state on a regular basis for work. My car-less-ness is mostly about the annoyance of trying to park the damn thing and the exorbitant insurance costs.
If I ever move out of the city, it’s going to be to a remote and rural middle-of-nowhere. (I’m a creature of extremes when it comes to housing. Put me smack dab in the middle of a large city or way the fuck out in the back of beyond. To hell with suburbia.) In which case, I’m buying a big ol’ truck.
Coastal elites, despite their illusions of worldliness, are remarkably shelter creatures.
I like Prairie City, cheap real estate and spectacular views of the Strawberry Mountains. Also reasonably close to a good brewery in John Day. I bailed on the Portland area several years ago because I was fed up with rain and traffic.
As for Yang and his carless society, make him live his vision in a town with a population of 1000 and the nearest supermarket is 25 miles away. The only thing stupider was some professor saying kitchens are wasteful because everyone eats takeout.
The girl that asked the Question, her major is health care managment. You would think he question would have been in that field. If you notice she has to read off her phone, wonder who realy writes the questions?
The girl that asked the Question, her major is health care managment. You wuld think he question would have been in that field. If you notice she has to read off her phone, wonder who realy writes the questions?
See the article about Dr. Hockey Stick? He sued the guy who said that his Global Warming chart was bogus. He lost the suit when he refused to reveal his data. The guy who caused the Global Warming shit-storm basically made the whole thing up!
Look at the results of this lying bastard.
And they say that one man can’t change the world…..
[…] Now let me reference some research I did in a previous post about how much of a dumbass Andrew Yang was…. […]