I think the non-VAT tax proposals could carry the UBI proposal most of the way there, minimizing the level of VAT needed.
SS income cap removal is only revenue for the Social Security Trust. From my knowledge of projections of - as I understand Yang wants to do - a 0.1% financial transaction tax and taxation of capital gains as regular income, the range of revenue is really wild - could be half a trillion, could be a couple trillion over a decade. Presumably he needs flanking measures to head off problematic income/asset restructuring and loopholes from a taxation perspective. Specifying those might narrow the range of projections. Taxing carried interest as regular income would raise almost nothing in terms of a trillion-dollar program. I haven't checked a projection for what the VAT proposal is supposed to raise, but inherently the more it generates the more it drains the pockets of the people who would benefit from UBI (creating a loop like British Indian taxation, if you get the reference?). For now I'd say we should be skeptical that Yang's non-VAT tax proposals really could pay for "most" of his Freedom Dividend program. So much for fiscals.
It would not leave people worse off, because as Yang himself says, it is opt-in. Everyone has the choice to either give up their current welfare programs and take the UBI or remain on the current programs which still require qualifications to receive.
People who opt out will still now be affected by the VAT. There's no cost-of-living adjustment to the dividend, but the (inevitable) impact of VAT on consumer prices may differ significantly by location and product. The main demographic I can think of who would benefit heavily from Yang's UBI are those mostly-poor individuals who report no or negligible taxable income, depending on what exactly their real income is. Such individuals tend to be ineligible for many existing welfare programs or entitlements, since no reported income means no reported employment. One might wonder, why don't we just target the dividend for them to eliminate poverty? Then, when the obstacle of defining and enforcing the means-test presents itself, one turns their attention to the main sources of expenditure for poverty-level households: housing, transportation, sustenance, and healthcare. Now one should be thinking, we have SNAP, but how about we
directly deliver housing security, accessible public transit, guaranteed childcare (for all the hidden fiscal costs of having to care for children), and guaranteed healthcare (for all the hidden fiscal costs of inadequate health or healthcare)... for the poor and for
everyone? Cash transfers can't do that, and in some markets such as residential rent they might especially contribute to already-runaway inflation.
Note that the very existence of an opt-out or conditional UBI would surely
frangify the programs under exclusion, and possibly endanger the rest of the welfare state in detail. If we have a Freedom Dividend but no universal healthcare, it seems very straightforward for centrists and Republicans to argue that 'the deficit is too high, we have to eliminate CHIP and cut Medicaid in half; thus we will protect the UBI and afford citizens the discretion to spend their money as they deem appropriate to their individual circumstances.'
Talking about UBI on the national stage and raising awareness of fringe ideas is good, but Yang's formulation is philosophically (perhaps much less so without VAT and welfare conflict) and politically objectionable to me. I stand by the Presidency not being an entry-level tech job. Don't let the Cali techbro culture get to you!
Pace Yang, do you have an opinion of the
article I linked a few posts ago? And for a consideration that you might take relatively seriously, note how Yang has less government experience and rapport with the Democratic party and DC crowd, with whom he will need work with in order to function as a president, than anyone not named Williamson. You're the kind of guy who prioritizes political infrastructure, right?
Social wealth dividends is interesting, but I'd like to see these left wing proposals get vetted by actual economists. My preference is a negative income tax for that reason, but Yang is literally the only guy on stage talking about it, so it is his plan by default.
Actual economists
are vetting left-wing policies - many of them are leftists themselves! If you want to get into the weeds you basically have to visit either one of the innumerable thinktank sites or the economists' own blogs, which I don't do. Dean Baker is one name I remember, and if you're interested in Modern Monetary Theory you can find exchanges about it between the likes of Stephanie Kelton and Paul Krugman. As for libertarian economists if you want, many of them are... not "actual economists", but some aren't outright frauds. I don't remember their names, but one whose surname starts with W or V (Volhynia? NOT VOLCKER) maintains a relatively well-known blog and offers some interesting takes.
The easiest way to provide said assistance is simply cutting them a check to use as they wish.
This form of assistance would have minimal value beyond - maybe, depending on the state of the world - keeping people alive at a starvation level. Unless paired with numerous other initiatives, starting with the guaranteed services I named but also including transfers of economic decision-making power away from business ownership and the wealthy and professional classes. Sure, $10K a year or whatever might be helpful to the hordes fleeing inland from Miami in 10-20 years in securing housing, but we're gonna need a little more than that as the basic shape of the economy changes under either market pressure on the global economy or government intervention thereon. There will be a lot more refugee waves than Miami besides. We can't allow wealthy sheltered urban areas to fortify themselves while swathes of the country are abandoned to a vast underclass to roam; a mere cash transfer without further commitments by the government or expectations from the populace makes this type of dystopian development more difficult to resist.
ACA significantly impacted the business model by prohibiting policy refusals based on pre-existing conditions. This was huge to the industry and even with the mandate, it meant that insurance companies were now on the hook for more expenses.
Funny enough, Republicans killed the mandate because it was the only thing about the ACA that was politically acceptable to voters to remove. Preexisting conditions are still covered. I would be pissed if I was the CEO of an insurance company.
It was a give-and-take. The ACA delivered - or delivers, if the Trump admin has finally relented to the courts and reinstated them - healthy subsidies to the insurers. It's part of the reason why costs have been held down relative to the before-times. Obama basically tried to give the insurers the least-bad offer available to them, and they came around. Now, what do we have to offer them? A swift and merciful death versus a lucid and tortuous one? While we're also demanding the pharmas and the providers line up behind to take their licks?
Also, the mandate turned out to be not-so-relevant. I read somewhere that the CBO after 2018 found it overestimated the changes in enrollment that would result from mandate repeal.
Nah, it's completely opposite. Big money interests wield their power by the ability to influence the verbiage of legislation and pushing for congressional stalemate/obstacles for bills they do not like. But this is all done in the shadows, in the one-on-one lunches and meetings. When the public gets energized, it doesn't matter how big the money payload is, they can't risk losing re-election and politicians play it very safe when it comes to that kind of thing.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a real-world correspondence to your model. Special interests certainly do not act only in the shadows; public influence operations and electioneering are a critical component of their work. I don't quite get how you're speaking like a Sandersite on this point. Maybe a sticking point is how you define "public energy" and its influence. It is not at all clear to me that many Democratic politicians will be threatened either in a primary or in a general by refusing to support a public option specifically. On the contrary, I can easily see how purple-district Dems might be cowed at the notion of having to explicitly contest Medicare for All with a Republican in an election while major industries and professional associations are screaming themselves hoarse. (Though I have no problem recommending to them wholehearted rhetorical signalling and self-sacrifice toward the end of passing legislation.)
How much money was there to be made by privatizing social security, but when Bush 43 pushed for it it didn't happen.
Look up Bush's House majorities during his first term: 4 and 12. There's no
party unity in the world that can kill Social Security on the basis of those margins.
We can't simultaneously pretend that we can rise up in some leftist political revolution and enact big structural changes while at the same time making it seems as if public opinion has no influence in policy decisions. Unless you are just advocating for violent revolution.
It's demonstrable political observation that public opinion has little influence on political decision-making on the level of lawmaking. It's not none, and the point of a (sensibly interpreted) "political revolution" is to expand that scope by organizing the public to both routinely engage with politics (vigilance and consciousness) and to demand more control over the levers of politics (i.e. leftist reforms). At the same time, you have to correctly interpret the world as it exists in order to know what is currently possible, what needs to be changed to shift possibility, and what the confluences of priorities and paths of least resistance are.
Anyway, how did we get to conversing in these terms? IIRC I was making the point that while you can't downgrade to a public option if you begin the legislative process advancing non-replicative universal government insurance, in consideration of stakeholder resistance there will not be much distinction between a public option and a unitary option (which may or may not form a case for going the whole hog). Obama wrangled the insurers. Now, what do we have to offer them? A swift and merciful death versus a lucid and tortuous one? While we're also demanding the pharmas and the providers line up behind to take their licks?
Why is it that I always need to prove to you that the numbers reported are factual 'on the ground' statements of reality, where you can simply dismiss all of it as trickery in the questions but you know in your heart that this instead is what they must be feeling.
As
cited by your favored outfit 538, only a tiny proportion (12%) of Democrats report having "made up" their minds on their primary vote. My polling-related questions are also somewhat rhetorical in that I already have an understanding of what I expect you to find based on the polling and commentary, including 538, that I have been reading. In other words I believe "the numbers" accord with my view of things. I'm not demanding fishing expeditions here.
Biden is gradually sinking in the polls with all demographics. Warren and Sanders combined have exceeded his polling average since the first debates. Overall his favorability tracks with Sanders's and Warren's (Warren has best favorability of all Dems by a hair). Biden's polling in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada (the first three primaries) is weak. There are a lot of younger conservative-to-moderate whites in the field that the Establishment might prefer to Biden, if not Booker or Castro or Harris or Warren [
EDIT: I can't believe I forgot about Klobuchar]. Biden was known in the past as a bad campaigner, he has been proving himself a bad campaigner this time around. Heck, his whole strategy seems to be to campaign as little as possible and hope he can float above a divided field. This is the high-energy candidate we expect to confront Trump in the general? The debate stage would be fossilizing in real time.
I hesitate to make such a confident prediction at this stage, but as I watch Warren demonstrate more and more her character as a hardworking and skillful retail and backend politician, and Biden show himself time and again a clueless fuddy duddy and last desperate warble of a faction of a faction of the party (i.e. "empty suit"), the stronger my intuition that something like the following will come to pass: Biden drops out by the end of the year and Warren gains a solid lead before Super Tuesday, or Sanders drops out/joins Warren's team after New Hampshire or Nevada to help her blow out Biden on Super Tuesday. I would even sock it into my stillborn Predictions Thread. Thankfully (?) life passes extremely quick these days so we don't have long to wait and see.
(Although I have to say Bernie Sanders recently proposing a $16 trillion climate plan involving, at last, nationalization on a grand scale, is really driving up his equity. I wonder if Warren will update her more piecemeal array of climate plans in light of this. Hopefully the particulars exceed even the late Inslee's portfolio.)
One debate doesn't make or break a candidate. Obama did poorly in the first debate against Romney. I want to hear more from Pete.
Slow and steady wins the race. You'll be hearing that one more.
California is no where near command and control. California leads the nation in implementing incentives, regulations, and mandates to correct for inadequacies in the market to handle certain problems which is why it has had the success we have seen, but that does not mean that California is not using market based policies or that market based policies are not the most effective way of facilitating change. To be honest, the report notes most of the increase in carbon-zero electrical generation was from hydro, and you can't be telling me this is not misleading when California just came out of a long drought. Climate change is only going to depress hydro in the long run as my state gets hotter, and the rate of non-hydro renewable increase was not very impressive.
Encouraging more fossil fuel divestment and removing subsidies on those sources (while boosting subsidies on local solar and smart grid infrastructure development) will do more than a return of soviet style management.
The idea that the main limiting factor of progress is the degree to which the force of government is applied is historically wrong and dangerous on many levels.
The regulatory state is a form of command economy, or more precisely, regulations on commerce and industry are an aspect of state command. A public utility and an efficiency standard are both forms of command. That doesn't make California a "People's Republic", just as a national health service doesn't make the UK a socialist country. Virtually every state is a regulatory state, to varying degrees; the East Asian countries (inc. Japan and South Korea) have to my understanding always been higher on the command axis than California is now.
As you acknowledge, the Californian regulatory state has seen success where other states that are not as interventionist have not. Is the evidence I cited
in itself necessarily dispositive regarding market and command? Of course not, but it is suggestive if market mechanisms do not evince causal efficacy in changes where regulatory or fiscal mechanisms may. Ultimately we're coming in with different preconceptions based on prior encounters with other evidence, toward development of our unique worldviews.
Here's a
paper on climate change impacts on California hydropower; you're right, generation could certainly be reduced (though I didn't read how the paper accounts for increased efficiency or fitting with additional capacity on existing dams). Regardless, hydropower will be almost irrelevant in the big picture of a renewables transition. Almost all progress on renewables as a category share of generation has reportedly been
undercut by nuclear plant closures in the same time period. Which indicates, again and from both the nuclear side and the renewables side that the market is insufficient to create the capacity we need where we need it, in addition to the unfulfilled need to adjust the functioning of many sectors of the economy that produce carbon to... produce less carbon.
We didn't have Soviet-style management in the 30s or 40s, but we did have invasive industrial policy, tremendous fiscal stimulus, and a touch of (albeit temporary) nationalization. I literally advised the disciplining of private enterprise, not its elimination (at these stages), so don't bark up the wrong tree. The level of necessary nationalization can always be debated, but to reject it outright - and I don't know whether you do - would be "historically wrong and dangerous on many levels." Did you know that Obama's green stimulus was actually pretty good? It's just that we should have done it on at least 10X the scale.
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