So, taking this from the same page as the green new deal stuff, but I did want to examine Hawkins' plans on my other three major priorities.
Income Guarantee
As the civil right movement turned “from civil rights to human rights” in the 1960s to address widespread poverty, it called for the elimination of poverty through a guaranteed minimum income above poverty in the demands of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1966 Freedom Budget, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.
A guaranteed income could provide every American with an income above poverty.
Providing a guaranteed income at the federal poverty line would cost about $200 billion a year. This estimate is based on a Negative Income Tax (NIT) where people below the poverty line receive income to bring them up to the poverty line, with a 50 percent phaseout rate where the NIT payment is reduced 50% for every dollar earned until the taxpayer reaches 200% of the poverty line.
The NIT is an extension of the progressive tax system to those with low incomes who receive monthly payments from the IRS instead of paying taxes to it. Just as a higher income taxpayers pay increasingly higher rates as their income goes up, a higher tax rate, those below the poverty line would pay an increasingly negative tax rate—i.e., the IRS would pay them—as their income goes down.
The other common proposal for a minimum income is the Universal Basic Income (UBI) that pays every person, rich or poor, the same basic income grant. It is many times more expensive to the federal budget, even if the grant is included in taxable income. We prefer the NIT because it involves less transfer of money back and forth from the government to people and back than a Universal Basic Income.
That $200 billion cost of NIT is about the same as all current means-tested anti-poverty programs, which do not cover all people living below the poverty line. About 40 million people currently live below poverty line. A total of 100 million people, nearly a third of the population, have incomes below “near poverty,” defined as 125% of the official poverty line. A 2013 AP survey found that 4 out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives.
The US should adjust its poverty measure to reflect the real costs of living. The current poverty line is three times a 1955 estimate of a budget for a “thrifty food plan,” adjusted for inflation. The costs of housing, health care, college, and new necessities like internet connection have grown far faster than food costs since 1955.
A more realistic poverty line, reflecting today’s real costs of living, would be at least 133% of the current poverty line. Estimates of the costs of providing an Income Guarantee of 133% of the current poverty line come to about $400 billion a year.
Because the Green New Deal program outlined here would provide for full employment at living wages, many people now among the working poor would see their incomes rise well above poverty. But many people cannot work due to age or disability. They need an Income Guarantee.
In the context of the Green New Deal, we estimate that providing an Income Guarantee of 133% of the current poverty line would cost about $200 billion a year as part of a Green New Deal.
For this second, I'm gonna apply my standard grading metric:
Is this a real UBI?
Not really, it's an NIT. I think it's intended to be universal, but given this design it will have the design flaw of being able to restrict who gets it. And given how much of a jobist this guy is he might restrict it only to the disabled and elderly. In which case it wouldn't even be remotely a real UBI.
12/20
How much is it?
133% of the poverty line, which would amount to around $18,000 a year. That's very good actually.
20/20
Is it regressive?
Freaking definitely. Has a 50% clawback rate, which is an effective marginal tax rate on every dollar earned. my own plan keeps this at 18% or so, with it bringing total tax burden up to maybe 30-40%. Most NIT plans i've studied previously were at 33%. If you have to pay 50% on top of existing taxes, that's going to be like an effective rate including payroll, income, and local taxes of around 60-70%. That's insane.
10/20
Do the numbers work?
I'm not sure. They seem to low ball the costs but also seem to expect a lot of people to work jobs. Either this isn't universal or fewer people will work than he thinks. Still his funding works ON PAPER, so I won't give him a bad score here.
16/20
Will this UBI give people the ability to say no?
I'm not sure. This dude is a jobist through and through and acts like most people will be working. While he doesn't seem to express whether he would give a UBI to dissenters who refuse to work a green job, he didn't say he wouldn't either. I'm unsure. Anyway, I'll split the difference between yes and no given the ambiguity.
10/20
Overall- 68/100 (D+)
Honestly, I don't trust this plan. I was fair to it given my metric, and it would solve poverty, but I'm not entirely sure either way that it would fit my indepentarian idea of what a UBI is. This guy is a green new dealer first, and UBI is an afterthought. If he wanted to, he could easily cut people off to force people into his massive jobs programs, which would be a bit too authoritarian socialist for my tastes.
On paper it seems like it's okay, but I'd prefer a real UBI, with a more modest green plan.
National Health Service
A National Health Service would deliver services largely through publicly-owned clinics and hospitals employing salaried staff, and be governed by a federation of locally-elected boards. That will provide better accountability and cost control than a top-down Medicare-like national health insurance system paying mostly private providers to deliver health services.
Currently, Professor Gerald Friedman calculates that currently the national health bill is about $3.1 trillion, and that a Medicare for All would save about $600 billion in administrative costs and lower drug prices, so the national health bill in a single payer system would be about $2.5 trillion; but then he adds back about $350 billion to expand the system to handle services like long-term care and dental, so we have about $2.8 trillion for a single payer system
However, according to the OECD, health cost per person in the U.S. is $10,209 per person, while cost per person in the U.K. is only $4,264. With 330 million people, if we had a National Health Service with the same price per person as in the U.K, the cost would be about $1.4 trillion, or about $1.8 trillion adding in Friedman’s expansion of services. Since we now spend about $700 billion on Medicare and $400 billion on Medicaid, then we could assume that the same $1.1 trillion would go to the NHS, while we would need $1.8 trillion, assuming the same cost per person as the UK NHS. This implies adding about $700 billion to the budget to get full coverage. This could be covered by the revenues covered in “How to pay for the Green New Deal” (see below). However, they could also be covered by keeping the current employer contributions to health insurance, which would go to the government instead of private insurers, about $400 billion, plus keeping the payments employees make for their health care (another $300 billion).
In other words, a Medicare for All system would cost $2.8 trillion, but assuming a similar cost as in the U.K., a $1.8 trillion system for a National Health Service. Could we really spend $1 trillion less with a National Health Service?
First, the Green New Deal will make Americans much healthier because they will 1) be provided with inexpensive organic food, including many more fruits and vegetables and 2) eventually there will be virtually no pollution. In addition, depending on how quickly walkable neighborhoods are constructed, the national health bill from car crashes will decrease, and the amount of walking will increase health. So let’s say that would save $500 billion.
Second, let’s add back $200 billion in case Americans can’t be as efficient as Britons, and we have a national health bill of $2 trillion. If we assume that we keep the $700 billion from employer/employee contributions, then we only need to add $200 billion each year to get a full National Health Service for all Americans.
For healthcare he's basically pushing an NHS style service. Which, I would deem unreasonable, where we are. Shifting to single payer I can see, and a public option is pragmatic too, but while I admire the NHS, I can't see us, from where we are now, just nationalizing the entire healthcare industry, but this is howie hawkins, after all, and he is a socialist.
And his numbers don't work out. He assumes we can make the system as efficient as the UK's which relies on a crazy amount of solutions. Any transition will require us to bite the bullet for massive costs in the mean time, where the government absorbs all CURRENT costs and then works to get them down to reasonable levels.
We pay $1.6 trillion already, and need $4 trillion based on my last single payer analysis. So we need $2.4 trillion. It's true, we could likely say $500 billion on administrative costs, but that still would require $1.9 trillion in additional funding. perhaps other stuff could get it down an optimistic $500 billion due to the monopsony effect controlling costs, but if we went from 20% to 12% of our GDP on healthcare, implying a 40% reduction in costs, we should be spending $2.4 trillion total and need an additional $800 billion in funding.
That works out to not much different than Howie's numbers, but that's the most optimistic case scenario. In reality, we should assume the cost for $4 trillion to be cautious, understanding we could likely realistically maybe get it down to $3 trillion. Given I would likely endorse Yang's healthcare plan instead of Howie's, which would cost 1/10th as much as Howie's, we can afford to spend more on healthcare and UBI, but yeah. Howie's numbers are kind of shaky here. And while we could compensate for this, not with that massive green new deal proposal of his. That's really sucking all of the money out of the room.
Free Public College
According to Senator Bernie Sanders, it would cost about $70 billion per year, and that includes paying more than Sanders advocates, replacing state level funding in order to give states more money.
So...Bernie's plan. Glad we're in agreement.
Homes for All
Homes for All
Using US Census data, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that the US has a shortage of 7.8 million units of affordable housing for very low income (7.5 million) and homeless (400,000) households and individuals. The study used the federal standard of affordability of 30% of income.
Public Housing
It is much less costly for government to directly build public housing units than to try to incentivize private developers to build affordable units with tax breaks and subsidies. That latter approach has been the dominant housing policy since the 1970s and the housing affordability crisis has only increased under this policy. Relying on the private market to provide sufficient affordable housing has never worked because more profits are to be found in upscale housing development than in affordable housing development.
It is time to return to public housing to provide affordable housing, but this time do it the right way by building high-quality, humanly scaled developments that house affluent and middle-income people as well as low-income people. Public housing is available to all income groups in many European countries. In some European cities, as much as 60% of the housing is not-for-profit housing in the public and cooperative sectors.
We estimate the costs for Homes for All in the Walkable Community Construction Program under the Green Economy Reconstruction Program. The Walkable Community Construction Program will create 2.5 million units of public housing a year. By making 40% of these units affordable for very low income people, 8 million affordable units for very low income people will be created over the course of the 10-year program and will close the affordability gap for very low income people.
The public housing we envision will be mixed-income like public housing in many western European countries, where low-income, working-class, and middle-class people all live together in public housing developments. Mixed-income housing will cost the public treasury less because the rents will be scaled to income and the higher income residents’ higher rents will partially cross-subsidize the lower rents that low income people will pay.
Mixed-income public housing will also break down the race and class segregation in housing that has persisted and actually grown more extreme since the 1990s despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The old public housing increased segregation by concentrating poor people of color in housing projects that are often isolated from jobs, public transportation, grocery stores, educational institutions, and other resources, services, and opportunities. By mixing households across income levels in the new public housing, it will desegregate housing by economic class and by race because race and income stratification correlate to a significant degree.
The new public housing will be built to sequester carbon in building materials and to be powered, heated, and cooled by clean renewable sources of electricity. The developments will be located to redevelop out cities and towns into walkable communities that are more energy and resource efficient.
In sum, this public housing program will be a jobs program, a desegregation program, a walkable communities program, and a clean energy program as well as an affordable housing program.
Universal Rent Control
With the shortages of affordable housing, high rents are driving many working-class people out of their homes, often into periods of homelessness. The gentrification of working-class neighborhoods unnecessarily displaces many families away from their neighbors and community institutions even if they can find affordable units elsewhere. Displacement tears at the fabric of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification. We need to find ways to uplift communities – and re-densify poor urban communities that have lost housing and businesses – without displacing current residents. One way is to ensure new development includes sufficient affordable housing, which our public housing program is designed to do.
In the meantime, as affordable public housing units are being built, we need to protect existing residents from being displaced from their communities by rising rents. Rents are rising much faster than incomes and the cost of living in cities and towns across the nation.
We therefore advocate a federal program of Universal Rent Control that will cap rent increases each year and end evictions without a just cause so that people can stay in their homes. The federal government had national rent control during World War 2 when resources were devoted to the war effort and away from housing development, creating a tight housing market. We should do the same now to protect tenants in today’s tight housing markets. Oregon passed a state law in 2019 that ends evictions without a just cause and caps annual rent increases. We should do the same federally to help people stay in their homes while sufficient affordable housing is being built.
We discussed this as part of his green new deal, but let's include it again here.
While we certainly do need to build more units, he has way too much of a green emphasis with the city planning, and his calls for rent control are insane.
Btw, this would cost $250 billion a year, which isn't bad. That's about what 8 million units costs based on Bernie's plans too. So I do approve even if I think some aspects of this are nutso.
Conclusion on Hawkins
Honestly, Hawkins hits all of my priorities, but he is so laser focused on the green new deal, that I believe he overemphasizes that, at the expense of other things.
His UBI plan is an NIT and I'm not even sure it's truly universal.
His M4A plan is ambitious but too optimistic on funding.
Free college and housing aren't bad although I don't like rent control.
His green new deal plan would solve climate issues but is too extreme for me.
All in all, I'm not a huge fan on his proposals. Would I support him again? As a protest vote, maybe. I mean, if I had to do a purity test on my top priorities, this is how he would score.
UBI- 40/100 (mainly due to NIT and potential lack of universality)
M4A- 50/50 (in principle I like it, I just don't like his numbers)
Free college- 25/25- Nails it
Climate change- 25/25- Like using a fatman on a bloatfly but still, full credit.
Total: 140/200
I expect that to be competitive with other candidates. Probably beat a centrist democrat. Yang could likely compete with it if he ran.
Hawkins is...okay. I don't really agree with all of his proposals or emphases, but we can't always afford to be picky in the current political environment. Candidates who at least pay lipservice to all of my priorities are rare. And even if hawkins is flawed, again, if I'm supporting him as a third party, it's primarily a protest vote. I'm not gonna sweat details of plans that will never come to fruition.
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