Examining Allan Sheahan's Basic Income Plan

 So, recently, I came across an older basic income plan someone came up with that is fairly popular, and precedes my interest in basic income. It is written by Allan Sheahwn, a basic income activist. He made a plan for a basic income plan in 2006, which was featured in his 2012 book. 

That said, let's get into it.

The amount

Allan Sheahen wrote a basic income plan for $10,000 per adult and $2,000 per child. This comes out to, $13,246.73 for adults and $2,649.35 for children today, accounting for inflation. This isn't bad as the adult basic income is literally just about on track for my basic income, although the childrens' basic income should be a bit higher. I mean, you really want the child benefit to be 30-40% of the adult benefit, not 20%. 

Still, this is a solid amount and I would be happy with this.

The cost

In 2006, he argues this would cost around $1.9 trillion. This seems relatively cheap, but given the lower population and the fact that seniors who get social security wouldn't get it, which I kind of have problems with. Social security is NORMALLY more generous than BIG, but if you're not a decent earner in the work force or if you're tangentally attached to the labor market, you very well might get less. I believe BIG should be an option for those who BIG is would be more than social security.

How he pays for it

He comes up with $740.8 billion per year from eliminating tax loopholes. Looking at the appendix a lot of these deductions should go, but I'm not sure about including healthcare related ones here. Then again this is largely because I want to apply them to medicare for all. He also implements taxes on a lot of government benefits that do exist, like railroad retirement, worker's compensation, social security, etc. I do this too, but it's a slap in the face to cut benefits while not giving these guys a UBI. For me, those taxes are an alternative to spending cuts which would otherwise be more severe. I don't tax people who take social security benefits just because. 

He raises $244.4 billion by "eliminating the standard deduction and personal exemption from the tax code." I already eliminated the standard deduction in my plan, but now I'm curious about the personal exemption. Could be another source of revenue for me to raise in my own plan. I'll need to look into this. EDIT: Done, Trump eliminated the personal exemption as part of his tax cuts, so I guess I can't cash in on that.

Next, he cuts over 100 programs from welfare, raising $375 billion. Some of these I've touched already in my own plan. EITC, child tax credit, and a lot of traditional welfare programs go bye bye here. However, he also touches stuff I wouldn't touch, like farm subsidies and section 8. Look, some stuff I leave in place specifically because I don't know if there are negative consequences to cutting it. I suspect a lot of farm subsidies exist to encourage food overproduction, for example. I trust the government to have a farm policy that makes sense and ensures we don't hit food shortages in a given year, so I don't support taking them away. I also don't like cutting ALL welfare programs. Some should clearly remain. He also cuts stuff like railroad retirement. I mean, dude, you don't want to screw people out of retirement money they worked hard for, do you? I can't say I agree with all of these changes.

From there, he basically sets his sights on reversing Bush's agenda. He would reduce the defense spending by $160.9 billion by reverting back to its 2000 levels. This is equivalent of around a 35% cut, so much deeper than my cuts. He does this, basically reversing Bush's defense increases and scaling down our war on terror, in effect. Keep in mind this is 2006, so the political climate is different then. I'm not sure such a proposal would be viable in 2006 without an exit plan from Iraq and Afghanistan (Iraq we should've gotten out of quickly, Afghanistan I would've been fine staying in until 2011 when we killed Bin Laden), but I respect the effort. For reference I'd love to cut our military more than I do. I've toyed with the idea of doing so. But I also tend to not like the idea of just radically cutting agencies without knowing exactly where the money is going and if we can do it without harming the functioning of those agencies. I don't want to cut military spending and then send our troops into battle without body armor, for example. I don't want to stiff veterans of their benefits and pay. I don't want to lose an arms race with China, for example. So, I admit, I'm far more conservative in my defense cuts. In principle, I'd love to cut the defense budget to around $420 billion these days (roughly 2% of GDP), which would be a similarly large cut. But at the same time, I don't like the idea of "just cutting things". So I tend to be like, let's reverse to the Obama era and if we can cut more, great. That said, I'm not sure how pragmatic this idea is.

Finally, Sheahen implements tax reforms, raising $639 billion and giving us a budget surplus. These improvements include reversing the Bush tax cuts (again, 2006), going back to 1994 levels of taxation, getting rid of separate tax rates for different categories, taxing the rich at higher levels, and expanding the social security payroll tax to all income levels. These are interesting. Given he is not funding this with a flat tax rate increase like I am, his payroll tax and income tax surcharges on the rich could work. He also does not seem to be the kind of guy who really invests much in other social programs, implementing a relatively "right wing" basic income (I'll explain this later), so I'm not sure he has other ambitious programs to fund. That said, these policies are viable, while under my plan they might have problems due to the sheer scope of my own agenda. Other aspects of these ideas don't work, because they involve rolling back Bush era plans, when Bush has been out of office for 12 years now. So contemporary solutions don't match modern needs. And sure, we have Trump tax cuts we can revert, but I assume Biden will be using those on other things. 

That said, he comes up with $2.16 trillion in funding, far more than the $1.9 trillion he needed. Whatever else I think about this plan, it works.

Analysis

I have a mixed view on this plan. On the one hand, I find it amazing he found so much money in the existing tax code to raise to fund this UBI. He barely needed to actually "raise" taxes at all, outside of his last proposals to add surcharges on the rich and expand social security payroll tax to all incomes. Most of his other ideas were cutting stuff, reverting Bush era stuff, or removing tax deductions. I feel like I have a lot to learn from this plan.

At the same time there are a lot of things I don't like about this plan. As I implied above, this seems to be a "right wing" UBI. Right wing UBIs focus on consolidating all social safety nets into a UBI, regardless of whether this is a good idea. I think this is bad and would turn the left against UBI, while the right is already hostile to it and will continue to be because "hurr durr free money to those who don't want to work". This isn't the moderate conservative party of the pre Reagan generation. These guys hate social programs. They'll NEVER support a UBI worth supporting. And with this plan, you lose the left. It plays into fears that the goal of UBI is to destroy the safety net, and he does that. With me, I like to take a balanced approach. Cut redundant stuff, but also preserve social programs that help people more than the UBI itself. Stuff like section 8, and unemployment, and social security. And I do believe in maintaining obligations to existing retirement funds. I'm not for just raiding everything just to pay for a UBI while having nothing else. His UBI is fairly austere in nature, which is how he can get away with funding so much of it without tax increases. 

Still, one thing I can say about this plan that I can't say about Yang's is that it actually adds up and works. He made the numbers work. It's a very well researched and thought out plan, even more thought out in a lot of ways than mine. Then again this seems to be a work of literal scholarship, so I would expect that. This is professionally done, and it shows. I just don't necessarily agree with how he did it.

Still, he does propose an alternative, for the detractors.

Plan 2 - the UBI-FIT model

Ah, now we get more into familiar territory. It's 2014 all over again, as this idea looks a lot more like my original UBI plans from that era. Here, he assumes a taxable income level of $6.2 trillion. He estimates being able to raise $2.17 trillion with a 35% tax. Adding that to other existing taxes, he raises $3.3 trillion. He continues to cut social programs here, and raises $536 billion in the process. He estimates essentially having a budget deficit the same as what existed in 2006 under this model. 

This seems...viable. I mean, my original plans did something like this. He estimates that his plan has a break even point at $28,572, which is...low...very low. I mean, that seems like median income roughly at the time. Then again, he has a very high flat tax. Admittedly that's the entire tax code minus corporate, excise taxes, etc., so it ain't that bad, but yeah. 

I mean for the record, given my UBI flat tax and removed deductions, I suspect the marginal tax rate on a lot of people would be around 35-40% so this isn't too out of the ballpark. And my original UBI-FIT model had a 45% tax, so this isn't that bad, but it does seem kind of harsh on the surface. Admittedly he's assuming one person. If you had a family of four, they would get $24,000 in UBI under this plan, and that means the break even for a family of four with be $68,571. And that's for all taxation from the feds. Translating this into 2021 dollars, this amounts to $37,849 for single adults, and $90,834 for a family of four.

Meanwhile, let's think of my own plan. You would have a 17% UBI tax, plus 10-12% in income tax due to elimination of the standard deduction, going up to 22% around the $40k mark. And then payroll taxes, which amount for almost 7.7%. I guess my plan comes out about the same in practice. Probably starting off around 39-43% at low incomes (this includes my M4A plan) and going up to 61% or so on the rich (keep in mind my 70% figure includes local taxes). Given my UBI-FIT model of 45% that sounds about right. 

That said, assuming he's simplifying the entire federal government into a single tax, minus stuff like corporate and excise taxes, this seems like a solid plan. I can't complain too much.

Conclusion

This guy has some interesting ideas. However, I do think he's a bit harsh with cutting social services and tax exemptions at times. Sometimes things are there for good reason, and removing them could cause issues, so I'd be leery of doing so. As I like to always say with my own philosophy, we want to take a scalpel to the existing safety net, not a hacksaw. We want to carefully cut away the parts we don't need while leaving in place what we do need. My own plans rely on this scalpel philosophy and only cutting away redundant parts of the safety nets, while this guy tends to hacksaw everything away. Sometimes I wonder, given the sheer amount of stuff that exists for low income people, if a broad based cutting like this makes them worse off. I mean the tax exemptions I can understand, but cutting all the welfare seems like a bad move.

Still, his approach shows how much stuff can be cut if we really wanted to, and how we could fund a large portion of a UBI from spending cuts and getting rid of tax writeoffs alone. I have some stuff to learn from this. All in all, if I had to grade his proposals, I'd give them a B. Very well researched, but ultimately, do some things I don't approve of. Still, if this were a bill in congress with a real possibility of passing, I wouldn't complain too much, although I'd imagine some progressives would probably be livid.

Would reducing the work week help?

 So, a lot of anti work people like to emphasize the size of the work week as the path forward to solving technological unemployment while making us all work less. Honestly, the idea is interesting, but I'm not convinced it's THE solution. It would help, don't get me wrong, but let me explain the difficulties that reducing the work week would have relative to UBI.

The big thing about reducing the work week is that it's a regulatory change, and regulatory changes are only as good as the laws themselves are. If you make the minimum wage $7.25, people will pay $7.25 without market forces forcing wages upward. If you make people work, say, 30 hours a week, they'll still find ways to make people miserable the whole time, or find loopholes in the law to make it where this statute doesn't matter.

After all, the 40 hour work week exists, but many people work more than 40 hours. You got salaried workers who work insane hours and are paid the same regardless of hours worked. People who work overtime when working hourly. And because of the common problem with employers not wanting to give people healthcare, you often got people working multiple 25-30 hour a week jobs, meaning they work 2 jobs at 50-60 hours total. Simply reducing a statute does not solve these issues.

Speaking of that last bit, many employers want to hire people for only 25-30 hours a week? The problem is people can't live on that. And while we could raise the minimum wage to solve that, it would involve raising it not only to the point where we achieve a living wage at 40 hours a week, but raising it even higher, making labor even more costly because we now expect a 30 hour a week job to pay what a 40 hour a week job should. So say the minimum wage should be $15 at 40 hours a week, if we wanted a 30 hour work week, it should be $20 an hour so they can make the same amount of money. 

This might work. Or it could theoretically cause inflation if it's too high. I'm not sure on that. Or employers could find more ways to automate and streamline work, which isn't a good thing if you're looking to expand employment. The point is, if this is your way of trying to achieve "full employment", basically redistribute work that exists so people work fewer hours, but we still expect everyone to work, I mean, it might work, but it might have side effects and not really fix the issue beyond reducing the work week slightly. Employers will still overwork poor salaried people, still force overtime at times, maybe underwork people to social obligations like health insurance, and nothing really changes.

It also ignores that there are vastly different needs for work across the entire economy. A lot of the people who this would work best for are office workers. As we know from David Graeber's "Bull**** Jobs", a lot of work is drawn out to encompass 40 hours simply because social convention demands it. A lot of these jobs could be done in, say, 15 hours on average, but people have to pretend to work and be busy to avoid either being laid off, or given a paycut. Some have automated their entire job, without telling their boss, for fear of being let go and their script taken by the boss and used for his benefit. Reducing the work week would work great for these people. It would allow them to not keep up as much of a charade of pretending to be soooo busssyyyy all the time, and allow them to work as they want. 

But, different parts of the economy have different needs. Service sector work is hour intensive. If you're running a restaurant, you need people there working constantly, around the clock. Same with retail. While automation might eventually eliminate these jobs entirely, they rarely reduce hours in a partial fashion. They just eliminate whole roles. So people are let go, rather than cross trained and expected to work less. Same with factory work. You either automate the job, or you need someone there around the clock doing something. While we could distribute the jobs better, shifting to a shorter work week means more turnover, more people going in and out, more disruptions, more problems with people not doing their shifts, as more shifts will exist. Employers seem to prefer working fewer people harder as it leads to no downtime. Not that I sympathize with employers, but it's a fact. It's also not necessarily good for the worker. Say we reduce working hours. Okay, now we have more people working crappy jobs for fewer hours. If we have 30 hour work weeks instead of 40, we have 4 people working instead of 3. It redistributes labor, but it just continues the process of having the service sector absorb other job losses.

Some employers dislike the idea of hiring more people to work less so much that they just work some people on salary 60+ hours a week. We could turn a lot of managerial jobs into two jobs, but that would mean needing more coordination between the two people doing the effective job, once again, leading to disruption. Ultimately the call to hire comes from the employer, not the employee. And without increased bargaining power from the market being influenced in other ways, all shorter weeks does is just cause employers to adapt to a new system and find ways around these regulations. 

Ultimately, it would be better I think to allow people more freedom in their choice of work. While a 30 hour work week or something should likely happen, I'm not saying it shouldn't, it could come with a basic income and the right to say no. Unless employees can walk altogether, they're still subject to a boss's whims and is not truly negotiating in a market place, but is begging for a position in a master-slave relationship. We can regulate the obligations for masters to treat their slaves decently all we want, but unless we change the core relationship, all this amounts to is a slight incremental improvement.

If people can say no, unmotivated people won't work and motivated people will. This increases the quality of employees. but it also means employees will command better pay and working conditions. Conditions would improve beyond mere pay, people could dictate the hours they work, because the'yre no longer subject to the whims of their employer in order to meet their immediate material needs. We might see a cultural revolution in work in which people don't want to work like before, and instead seek more work life balance, and employers will have to meet that or they won't be able to hire people at all. 

Heck, if anything, I kind of would like to see the abolition of the work week and the traditional job. We're trending toward gig work anyway, so why not embrace it? UBI meets basic needs, and then people work in a gig economy that actually works for workers due to the basics of supply and demand and the fact that workers are liberated from being forced to work long hours at a job. And people can do what they want. Some people aren't very motivated. They might work odds jobs for a little extra spending money. Some people are extremely motivated and might work long hours on passion projects or to climb the ladder. I believe people should be free to determine their own life, without being told how many hours they should or should not work. As long as the decisions to do so are truly voluntary, and not done under the threat of poverty, I really don't care what arrangements people come to. The work week debate is one that still moralized and valorizes the idea of work as a social obligations that everyone should participate in, but also still thinks people should be given a decent living standard for it. I have no problem with the latter, mind you, but that's why I want to give people a minimum standard outside of work, so we dont treat work as a social obligation everyone has to suffer through to earn their bread, but that it's what people want to do, either for more money, or a sense of fulfillment, or prestige, or what have you.I want people to choose how much they want to work, and be able to live a dignified life regardless of the decision, because if you can't guarantee that, then you're not really free.

Reducing the work week is a good idea. Don't get me wrong. I could see a 30-32 hour week working fine (5 6 hour days or 4 8 hour days), with little productivity loss, and most of the changes absorbed easily by the economy. But at the same time, we could also implement a UBI and have similar effects and absorb those instead. But in the process, we give people more freedom. The issue with relying on a shorter work week to save us is that it's just another regulatory band aid. it does not change the core issues with the economy. It just implements a law saying people should work less unless they meet certain exceptions or are paid differently or blah blah blah. It doesn't change the core relationship between employer and employee. And given the needs of the economy are different among different jobs, a shorter work week might help some, but do little to help others. And it certainly wouldn't change the fact that people are still motivated by the threat of poverty to work at all.

I'd happily take a work week reduction, but I'd encourage people to rethink the institution of work in far broader ways.

Funding a UBI lite with updated numbers

So, we you guys know, I recently updated my UBI numbers, giving us a much better picture of the tax rates needed to fund the idea in practice. But, someone asked recently how to fund a $9000 UBI recently, so I wanted to post an article on that specifically, with my new numbers.

For a baseline, you can read my main UBI idea here. These numbers rely on the work previously done there, as I'm just changing my formula a bit for a lower amount.

Target Amount: $9,000 for adults, $3,000 for children

Number of people: 244.42 million adults, 70.54 million children

Cost: $2.2 trillion + $212 billion = $2.412 trillion

Funding

Spending cuts

I'll keep most spending cuts, minus eliminating the standard deduction as the UBI is less than that and I don't want to tax people below the poverty line. People might wonder if some people might get more on welfare, but I'd imagine these would be extreme edge cases, my UBI should still be more generous than welfare and tax credits in most situations. 

Welfare cuts- $275 billion

Military cuts- $156 billion

EITC cuts- $70 billion

Child tax credit cuts- $168 billion (includes Biden's expansion)

Total- $669 billion

Taxes

I'll keep the same tax structure, just at a lower rate than my main plan. Total funding base will be $14.789 trillion in income. This also includes social security and unemployment, as an alternative to cutting these programs more deeply.

Carbon tax- $187 billion

10.5% flat tax- $1.553 trillion

Total- $1.740 trillion

 =======================================

Total- $2.409 trillion ($3 billion deficit from rounding)

And that's how you fund a basic income for $9,000/3,000. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

What I learned from doing a presidential tier list

 So, I was going to post a presidential tier list article, but it took me literally a whole day to go through everyone and rate them, and it was boring, and I don't think anyone wants to read that, so I'm just going to post the results and talk about them a bit. I more want to focus on what I learned from doing this exercise, than the actual presidents themselves.

For reference, here's the tier list.

1) Further disproving the narrative that compromise and "respecting the office" gets stuff done.

There's a lot of talk among democrats about incremental changes, and compromises, and trying to make everyone happy, and not stepping out of bounds. Bullcrap. 

The best presidents on my list are the ones who took life by the horns and actually decided to DO SOMETHING about issues. Lincoln preserved the union, Roosevelt introduced legislation, Polk expanded the US to the west coast, FDR gave us the new deal. These presidents gave little thought to whether it was the president's job to do these things, they just did it. 

For reference, my rubric for grading these presidents looked at what they did and what legacies they did. I weighed the good they did, and the bad, and I gave a rating based on the net score they got based on that. The best presidents always did tons of stuff, often fundamentally reshaping the country and leaving long lasting legacies in their wake.

Some of the compromisers and people respecting the power of the office were some of the worst presidents. Franklin Pierce, Millard Filmore, and Grover Cleveland are among these. The former two decided to compromise on slavery, which just inflamed everyone, driving us closer to the civil war. The latter decided to not act in the midst of the gilded age to improve the lives of people. These guys are the anti-Lincolns and anti-Roosevelts. Because they governed opposite of them, they ended up with bad ratings.

This is why I crap on Biden, by the way. I know I gave him a high ranking here, but that's because he has a few mildly progressive "first 100 days" ideas floating around, without the baggage a 4-8 year presidency has. His positives are still only 1/4 of what someone like FDR accomplished as well, and that's including FDR's downsides and baggage in there. He looks good here but he's likely not going to remain an A.

2) You can do lots of stuff but still be a scumbag with a bad rating

Woodrow Wilson is a good example of this. This dude carved out a legacy for himself, but his legacy is flawed. I personally blame him in par for pushing us toward WWII long term due to his aggressiveness toward the future axis powers in negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. He also was extremely repressive at home in dealing with protesters, even going so far to lock up Eugene Debs for daring protest against the draft. 

3) Democrats are often no friend of the left

Even during the new deal era, taking in the actions of these presidents as a whole, I can't say that the democrats are really the left's allies. Rather, they do what Biden is doing now, taking a few of the causes on acting on them, while stabbing them in the back elsewhere. Truman is notorious for this. He literally wanted to draft strikers in various industries who held off their labor grievances until after WWII ended into the military. And then there were the red scares and mccarthyism against socialists, essentially destroying the labor movement. More recent democrats are even less responsive, with Clinton essentially governing like a literal republican (his legacy even worse than Bush Sr's in some ways), and Obama being a moderate. To repeat point 2, you can do a lot of stuff, but if you also do a lot of bad stuff to outweigh your accomplishments, you're not going to be remembered well by me. 

Something for Biden to take into consideration with his tentative A rating. He could very quickly be knocked down to a B, C, or even a D tier president depending on what he does in the next 3.5 years. This is like grading Obama in May 2009. He likely could've gotten an A too. 

4) Some presidents are just awful

Even among the Fs I dont believe all of those guys were unilaterally bad, nor tried to be bad. I mean I could've split the F tier into 2-3 tiers in and of itself. Some were just scumbags like Wilson who had some positive legacy but I determined his good outweighed his bad. Some were republican presidents whose legacies are controversial, just disliked by me. But then you got people like Jackson who were just callous toward blacks and native Americans, while not being good at governing. And let's not even get started about Trump...

5) Trump is the worst president...by a wide margin

I knew Trump sucked, but looking at Trump now in retrospect, the amount of damage the dude has done to the office is just...insane. No president comes close. We had people like Jackson or Johnson who were divisive in the past, and people like Nixon who were corrupt, but none of them have anything on Trump. He's like this weird mixture of all of the worst presidents all at the same time. He's Jackson, Johnson, Wilson, Nixon, and Bush Jr all in one. I think the threshold was -10 scoring wise to get an F. Trump hit -43, and I started remembering more things he did after doing that rating. The next worse was Buchanan at -25, and even he arguably didn't deserve it THAT badly. I just kind of felt like if you're the dude who essentially let the civil war happen, that's kind of a big screw up. Trump never had a single screw up that was THAT bad, but he had so many screw ups along the way he ended up doing worse. Screw Trump. Just screw him.

6) Some presidents get more hate than they deserve

Sometimes crises (especially economic recessions) happen on the watch of various presidents...and they're blamed for them, even if they did nothing wrong. Pre FDR this is especially common. The president had little ability to actually respond to such crises back then, but they were attacked for not doing anything. Van Buren was blamed after Jackson's policies crashed the economy. Hoover actually did try with the great depression, he just didn't have the right solutions like FDR did. Again, sometimes it takes someone who breaks those boundaries and really says "I dont care what you say, I'm doing this" who actually gets crap done. Yes, there will always be naysayers of these greats, but sometimes if you want an omelette you need to break some eggs.

And let's not get started on Carter...

Conclusion

Doing this exercise did teach me a lot, and while I don't want to share the article I was going to write going into the details of each one as it is long and boring, it really does teach me how politics works. Looking at things in context really describes why I dislike politics as it exists. We have so many crises and no one with any ability to do anything actually wants to. We need someone who takes the reins of power, and forges a new path in the 21st century. We need a new Roosevelt. Someone like Theodore and Franklin who just come in and say, this crap needs to be done, and I'm not putting up with any crap and is able to do it.

I feel like the centrist dems are dooming their party to mediocrity. Even as good as Biden is doing on this chart, he's still not doing anywhere near enough. He might be a mildly fondly remembered president in the grand scheme of things, but he's no FDR. We need like a Bernie Sanders or a more competent version of Andrew yang.

Clarifying my perspective on jobs programs and the green new deal

 So, I know I came off as super negative toward Biden yesterday, but it was mainly because of how the media treated his ideas, acting like he's spending all of this money on stuff, when in context it's just one of those "larger than life" things where his actual legacy is far more mediocre.

Still, I do want to say I do support Biden's infrastructure bill.

As you guys know, I'm anti work, and I'm really skeptical of jobs programs. I believe jobs are a means to an end, not an end to themselves, and I dislike mainstream framing of these issues. Same as with the universal prek/childcare thing. The centrists tend to frame these things in these weird "these things allow us to WORK harder!" type approaches to things, and that's just...no. To me, jobs are a means to an end, not an end in itself. We shouldn't celebrate creating jobs for their own sake in this quasi religious devotion to "the economy", which is how Biden is framing stuff. 

At the same time, I need to remind people that while I don't talk about it constantly on here, we are facing a certain existential crisis, and that is climate change. If we cannot keep our greenhouse gas emissions under control, by 2100, our country, and the world, may very well be screwed. We're talking massive changes all around the world. Entire countries disappearing as sea levels rise. Dislocations and mass migrations. Famine, disease, etc. In the US, climate change could basically turn the northern part of the country into the southern part, and the southern part into Mexico climate-wise. This is not good. But, through technology, we can mitigate some of these concerns, while keeping our living standards somewhat. If we stopped spewing carbon and methane at the rates we are, and invest in sustainable energy and infrastructure, the worst of this damage could potentially be avoided. This is one of the reasons (other than the fact that Yang is a terrible politician with weak implementation of his ideas) that I ended up backing Bernie over him, despite my distaste for jobs programs. These ideas are fine, if we're getting something out of them that's substantive and tangible. And averting a global crisis is kind of a big deal. And given Biden's plan is just a scaled down version of that initiative, I support his idea.

We also do need to update our infrastructure. It was created back during the Eisenhower era, and it kinda sucked now and has fallen into disrepair. So I do support repairing and updating it for the 21st century. All of these ideas are good ones. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm on board with this stuff because he's doing what needs to be done. 

However, and this is where I crap on Biden, we need a lot more done on top of that. I don't think mainstream democrats understand how dire many of the issues we face are for many Americans. And I feel like democrats tend to just brush it off, in hopes to appeal to a more moderate, conservative electorate that doesn't want change. The screwed up thing about rank, two party democracy is that the population can be gamed in certain ways where you can build coalitions that blunt any progressive initative to change the system, by loading both parties with conservative factions that don't want change. This leads to two conservative parties. Another problem with a FPTP system like this is you can have a system that works for 51% of the population, and consistently win elections, even if it sucks for the other 49%. So the powers that be are doing the bare minimum to placate the people and appeal to relatively conservative parts of the electorate while keeping the working class elements that should come together and form their own coalition divided among the two parties. And Biden is doing that. He's doing the bare minimum to placate his coalition of urban and suburban moderates who care more about their 401ks than if we actually solve poverty. 

This infrastructure bill is a decent accomplishment, and given my distaste for broad jobs programs and work for its own sake, the price/performance ratio is about right for me. But, this should be a mere plank in a larger progressive platform. It isn't. It's his signature accomplishment. And he's making it out like he's FDR when he's not. Meanwhile he's acting like he's spending ALL THIS MONEY! (WOW! $500 billion or so, so like 2-3% of GDP, how progressive!), when in reality he's doing this distorted mirror thing to act more progressive than he actually is.

I just want to clarify that point.

The misleading optics of the "$6 trillion budget" Biden is for

 So, everyone is fawning over how great and ambitious Biden's agenda is, going on about how much he's spending and how he has a "$6 trillion budget" including a "$4 trillion spending bill", and how it's all going to be paid for by taxes on the rich. 

But, if you've been following me, you know Biden's plans aren't that impressive in practice. I mean, for the record, this year's budget is $4.8 trillion, not including the stimulus bill. 2020's was $6.5 trillion due to all of the pandemic stuff. And looking at 2019, before this began, it was $4.4 trillion. 

Also, Biden's actual agenda, those two programs he's pushing, the infrastructure and childcare package? That's $4 trillion over 10 years. It's $400 billion a year, and while it's paid for by the rich, that's all he's spending. 

To focus on the 2021 budget, where is this money going? Well, social security, medicare, and medicaid, take up a large portion of it, making up a combined $2.3 trillion of it, so almost half the budget. I'm sure the 2022 numbers will only go up. We spend $705 billion in military spending. $600 billion is in various welfare programs I mention cutting in my UBI plan (SNAP, TANF, EITC, etc). And then we spend several hundred billion on various departments that do various things.

$4.8 trillion. That's the baseline. Biden increases it to $6 trillion. 

Only $400 billion are from his signature plans. Biden does raise spending for various things, a slight defense boost. Perhaps raising some budgets for various agencies. This CNN article mentions a bunch of small things he does which add up. Some of which is quite good. Stuff like beefing up the CDC, investing in research to try to cure certain diseases, stuff related to schools, and housing, etc.

But, in the grand scheme of things, and this is where I'm critical, I feel like many of these things just amount to band aid fixes here and there They seem to add up roughly to another $110 billion per year. So half a trillion dollars, less than 10% of the budget, that's Biden's grand agenda. 

It's okay. Like, I know I'm overly critical of Biden, a lot of the stuff he's pushing for is stuff that arguably is good and needed. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure how much this actually amounts to anything. It just seems like standard democratic incremental fixes that people don't really notice in practice. And I just felt like calling that out.

Biden's administration is doing some nice things here and there, but I can't help but feel like he isn't really addressing the big problems of the day. He's doing things, but when I think about my top concerns, outside of the infrastructure thing and free community college (watered down from free 4 year college + student debt forgiveness), I cant help but feel like he isn't really touching my biggest priorities.

I know, i know, i'm weird, i'm independent, and I'm a bit of an ideologue. But I can't help but feel like on causes more near and dear to my heart, Biden is kind of flopping. And his agenda, despite being hyped up by the media as being the next FDR, is more FDR lite at best. 

It's okay. Like, I gave his presidency like a C so far, and a C he maintains. Average. Not great, doesn't blow my socks off. Not a failure either. Just meh. And that's what I think of this budget. I just wanted to put everything he's doing into context. It's not a $6 trillion plan unless you account spending that would happen regardless. It's more like a $500 billion plan. But that doesn't sound as ambitious. But that's what it is.

Being anti work isn't a matter of abandoning societal obligations, but questioning the legitimacy of those obligations in the first place

 This is kind of a continuation of my previous article about whether my generation, or I am lazy, and I feel like this is something that requires a lot of clarification.

Among detractors to anti work ideologies, most of them have this knee jerk reaction about the anti work crowd. The fact is, society is so ingrained with the devotion to the concept to work, that it is sacrosanct, and not to be questioned. In their minds, they think, of course we have to work, we've always had to work, what are with these people thinking no one should have to work, how do things get done? It's like their core ideological opposition to us is the fact that they see us abandoning a clear obligation in society for selfish reasons that imperil the common good. This seems to be the most charitable view of the anti-anti work crowd. 

But, that's the thing, perhaps, being someone who has left "the cave", maybe it's time to actually question this assumption about society? I'm going to be honest, as I said in my own personal story, I've never been big on the idea of work. I've always treated it with existential dread. I've always seen it as a negative thing. But for a time, I did see it as necessary. And as long as it is necessary, I guess flat out abandoning or rejecting such a calling is, to some extent, immoral. I can see real logic in the "he who does not work does not eat" mentality of old. At one time, if you didn't work, you didn't have enough crops in the winter, and people starved to death. Why not let the people who refuse to work, to starve to death if their laziness imperils a community? In a real, true scarcity oriented economy, the "jobists" as I like to call them have a point. He who does not work, shall not eat. We need to work to survive, because if we don't, we don't survive. It makes sense.

However, I would like to show everyone a chart. See that chart near the top of the page? That's the percentage of the economy working in agriculture over time. Notice something happen around 1800? Well, that's when the industrial revolution and modern capitalism began. And since then, the number of people in agriculture has dropped to under 5% in the most advanced countries. Why is that? Economic growth. But more specifically, what actually is economic growth? We like to define it as the number of people working and the amount of stuff being produced, but over time, what really drives the economy where we can produce more and more stuff...per person? After all, if it were just the number of people, we would still need most people to work in the agricultural sector just to survive. Instead we moved them to other sectors. What allowed this?

One answer: TECHNOLOGY. Agriculture isn't done the way it used to be. Farmers now have machines that have made it possible to mass produce all of the food we need for all, with only like 2-3% of the population. But what of the other people? We moved them to other industries, and they focused on doing other stuff. Nowadays, we have this extremely advanced economy with GDP per capita being $60k+. Even COVID, with its massive layoffs to minimize human activity to minimize spread of the virus, only barely put a dent in this number. Because what really drives economic growth is actually technology.

If anything, that's the problem. As books like Jeremy Rifkin's "The End of Work", and Andrew Yang's "The War on Normal People" have taught me, it's that technological unemployment is a major driver of unhappiness and unrest under capitalism. Yang points to the fourth industrial revolution causing technological unemployment like never before, but this is actually debatable as many jobists will insist that technology might displace jobs but there will always be more jobs in the future. I mean, to some extent, they're right, but that doesn't mean this isn't good for workers. We all know about the luddites, who smashed the machines in England, because the machines took their jobs. African Americans have long been subject to being screwed by technological unemployment, being forced off of farms in the 1960s as machines started picking cotton. So then they went north to make cars. And now machines make the cars, and now Detroit and the like is a massive ghetto. Whites have also been impacted, why do you think West Virginia went from socialist to conservative? Because their livelihoods depend on coal, and coal is a dirty energy source that should go the way of the dodo, but republicans wanna preserve it because...jobs...and because screw liberals and climate change. And as we look at the political instability starting post 2008, I think the big driver is this technological unemployment displacing people. The rust belt is swinging from being blue leaning to being red leaning, as the neoliberal democratic party abandons this area of the country for the areas that are winners in the 21st century economy such as the big cities, and the south/sun belt. And even within the democratic party there is a notable faction (I myself being part of it) that are flat out unhappy with the direction of the democratic party in recent years and decades. As ironically Bill Clinton once said, it's the economy stupid!

The fact is, regardless of whether technological employment will eventually drive half the country out of the workforce or not with no alternative forcing us to implement a basic income, as some would suggest, technology displaces jobs. It displaces livelihoods. And capitalism has always had problems with the distribution of wealth and income. To me, this core issue is related to....jobs, and our obsession with them. Why are we forcing people to continue to work for these private companies who dont give a crap about us, and just use us as de facto slaves, only to throw us away when they're done and hoard all of the wealth? Isn't the problem of the 21st century not one of a lack of resources, like pre-19th century agrarian economics was, but one of a lack of...meaningful employment that pays a decent wage?

Really, isn't employment, the problem? We talk nonstop about creating jobs for the future, as if we should be spending our time finding ways to continue to keep this system of forcing us to work forever, making more jobs, to fuel more economic growth, all while peoples' lives are increasingly precarious, and even worse, EXPENDABLE?!

Really, if we're that expendable, where we can be fired at any time, and replaced, or fired, and not needed, then why do we insist on continuing this pursuit of jobs?

At some point, we really need to have an existential crisis as a society, and that's why I'm anti work. I've gone through all of these existential crises already and I'm just screaming at people to take the black pill already. I'm just so turned off and alienated from this system, that I just can't defend it, and act like everything's fine. It feels...wrong. Like, it's not the rejection of work that makes me feel wrong, that feels authentic, it's the acceptance of the mainstream work ethic that feels wrong. We really are Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill endlessly for no freaking reason other than we have always done it, and we won't even question it. Our solution to running out of rocks is rather than saying "yay we don't need to roll rocks up hills any more", we make more rocks, because that's somehow easier than confronting the system that is so designed around rock rolling that we punish and condemn anyone who doesn't accept their rock, or doesn't have a rock. Rock rolling is mandatory for society, and don't you dare question it. 

Now, at the same time, that's not to say that we don't need anyone working. A common fallacy among the jobists is that they see anti work and are like "well if NO ONE works, how will society survive?" Yeah, we absolutely need some labor. At best we could reduce the work week and just keep the same old system, but in practice, due to geographic barriers, and employer needs, and the whole "our system isn't designed around people working part time" sort of thing, it might be better just to give people a basic income and let them choose what they wanna do.

I'm not an idiot, I'm not saying no one should work ever overnight. It would be nice to eventually reach that point, but it's not something we will do in our lifetimes. But, if we could all work a lot less, or give people a basic income to make work more voluntarily, then that's all well and good. 

And that's where I'm at. People have this idea that anti workers are irrational degenerates who are abandoning a necessary social obligation for everyone to partake in. Sorry, we haven't needed everyone working since the 1800s. Work weeks have gotten shorter through the 19th and early 20th century, and at this point the greatest economic challenge we seem to face is...employing everyone. 

Idk, I admit, I'm kinda "lazy" in the sense that I really don't wanna work, but at least I'm honest about it. But at the same time, I view my laziness not as a matter of societal dereliction, but of just wanting off of this batcrap insane treadmill already. I mean, if we can literally make a better society where work isn't as necessary, why shouldn't we? It seems to be like people would be more financially secure and better off if we did, and yes, I believe, the stuff will still get made. We can have balance there, and that's all I'm actually for. Balance. 

To me, the jobists are the actual immoral ones. They're the ones who wanna force everyone to work, often without guaranteeing them work or a paycheck to live on. That's why I give Bernie so much credit while disagreeing with him on work. At least he understands the basic bare minimum of "if we're going to force people to work, we should give them a decent wage, and healthcare,  and we should guarantee work for the unemployed". Again, not the ideal solution since I see jobs programs as inefficient and dystopian, as do the naysayers on the right who are for social darwinism, but that's where I step in and say, "ya know what, instead of giving people jobs digging ditches so they can say they put in their sweat and toil for their bread, let's just give them the bread and let them work if they want more." 

But yeah, it's messed up. Our politics are between the people who think that the surplus population should die, vs, the surplus population should be treated decently and integrated into the system. Meanwhile I'm just like "well if there's a surplus, why don't we just give people a little bit so they can survive and let them self determine from there?" No benevolent authoritarianism, no answering the sisyphus problem with more rocks. Just...hey, let's allow anyone who doesnt wanna roll a rock any more not to roll rocks, while still heavily incentivizing people in a positive way to keep rolling rocks. 

Anyway. That's how I see it at least. The way I see it, this system is pants on head backwards, and should be heavily rethought in coming years and decades. We literally don't need to work like it's 1800 before. If anything, maintaining the ancient work ethic seems to be the source of most of society's problems these days. If people wanna screw off and not work (within moderation at least), we should let them. It's not like we're all gonna starve when winter comes anyway. When people suffer when winter comes these days, it's because there arent enough good paying jobs available and the system is completely broken and failing people left and right. While poverty (and work) were inevitable for much of human history, in our modern society, both are a societal choice. And I choose a better society that isn't stuck in the past.

That said, I'm not gonna be sorry for being lazy. If anything, lazy people are what drive society forward. As Bill Gates once said, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." And you know what? That's what makes GDP per capita go up. Lazy people say instead of breaking my back, I'll make a machine to do the work for me. A lazy person says, instead of worshipping the protestant work ethic, I'm gonna make a society that both gives people freedom while providing for them at the same time. A lazy person asks the hard existential questions of "do we need to live like this any more, and if we don't, why are we still doing so?" And as a lazy person, I wish the rest of you would just take that black pill of laziness and understand where I'm coming from, rather than shaming people who think like me because you're so narrow minded and ignorant with your conception of reality. I wouldn't be for the policies I'm for, if I did not think they were doable, and I did not think they could work. I only spend so much time writing about them (which is a form of work, btw, even if it isn't paid) to show that they can be done. So either get on board, or get out I guess. Your choice.

Are millennials REALLY lazy?

 We often here the stereotype of the "lazy millennial" and how millennials are lazy and don't want to work and that's the real problem. Now, we're not talking about me. I understand I might come off as the posterchild of a "lazy millennial" and I plan to address that later on, as my own case is a special one and not representative of the norm, but here, I'm going to mostly talk about the norm. 

How most millennials seem to think

Here's the thing. Millennials are just like every other generation as far as work goes. They just tend to suffer from problems that previous generations have not and this makes them "lazy" in the eyes of older people.

Economically, we had a rough life. Our generation starts in 1981 and goes to around 1995, so when we were born, Reagan, Bush Sr. or sometimes Clinton were president. We graduated high school between 1998-2013, and college between 2002-2017. Given the recession started in 2008, and the economy has not been good since, over half our generation has been screwed in ways most have not in nearly a century now. Since our wages in our youth dictate much of the rest of our lives financially, many of us are screwed. We graduated into an economy that does not work, with an economy with no jobs. Many of us have had to take minimum wage jobs to get by, despite being the most educated generation ever so far. Globalization and automation are influencing a lot of economic changes too, making our lives more precarious. We only own 4% of the US's wealth, and are four times poorer than baby boomers. Baby boomers grew up into an economy where you could get a job, work for 40 years, get paid well, and retire. They could afford homes, and the necessities of life on the whole. I admit things changed over time for them too over time, but yeah, we millennials have it rough. We still live in our parent's basement because we can't afford to move. We can't afford healthcare. We can't afford to have kids. We can't afford anything. And many of us are angry.

There's a reason most of us lean left, and by left, I mean a more old school left, the Bernie Sanders/FDR left. Their ideas like free college, universal healthcare, $15 minimum wage, and jobs programs, are intended to solve the biggest problems of our time, given student debt is crippling us, college is unaffordable, healthcare is unaffordable, and we basically exist in a service economy that only pays $10 an hour minus the higher wages as of late with the "labor shortage". 

Many of us work too hard, that's the problem, and honestly, we largely just want a break. We want the changes the rest of the advanced world has with social democracy. We understand that America is a right wing dystopia for an economy that doesn't work for us, and we want change.

There's a reason I call Sanders' platform the bare minimum. Oh wow, you think people who...work 40 hours a week, should have a wage they should live on? How novel. I mean, DUH! Isn't this common sense? If you put in the time, you should be rewarded for it. I mean, how is this such a controversial statement?!

That said, let's focus on me.

Am I a lazy millennial?

Long story, yes, but I feel like I have intellectually justified my views. 

Here's the thing. I've always been a bit different. It isn't until more recently I started realizing I'm probably autistic, and that has a major impact on my views on work ethic and politics. I always...hated the idea of work. When I was a teenager just getting into politics, I had conservative views, but they weren't out of love for work, it was more the bitterness/resentment you often see among the GOP regarding "I work so hard, why should other people get stuff for free?". I mean, I saw society through a lens of scarcity and believed we all needed to work. That there wasn't enough to go around and you had to struggle and fight for what you had. That ideas like basic income were communism and that they would never work. Work, to me, was always this necessary evil. I accepted it because I accepted that we needed people to work, for society to function, and if we just gave everyone money that society would fall apart.

But then something happened. I grew up. I entered the crapshow of the economy mentioned above, and given my own anti-spiritual awakening in 2012 if we wanna call it that, I kind of started seeing the economy and society for the facade it was, hence Plato's Cave. It's all a facade. It's just this system we're born into, that most of us think works a certain way, and it quite frankly...doesn't. 

When I left college and grad school, I couldn't even find a job. And most jobs available weren't that great. I mean, minimum wage, $8 an hour, part time, no healthcare, I mean, after student loans I had nothing. What kind of sick joke is this? And I started thinking, hey, if we all needed to work, then why are hundreds of people applying to jobs? Why are the rich getting record profits? Why are we treated like crap? Don't we have a labor surplus if anything? Kind of investigating this black pilled me. 

I realized that all of this time, we had more than enough to go around. Our economy is so productive it could, theoretically, provide every single person a middle class lifestyle. Of course the logistics of that are difficult to realize, but we really don't need to have any poverty at the very least. We have so much wealth but it isn't distributed well, because we rely on trickle down economics where people are expected to get jobs and work for employers who treat you like crap.

I've known employers treated people like crap for a while. My dad was always miserable with his work, and came home going on about how much he hated his job. Much of my childhood, he was a nervous wreck over work. His work paid well, but his bosses treated him horribly. I went to college so I would never end up like him. But sadly I ended up worse off economically if anything. Part of this is the system, part of it is my fault. I was religious when I went to college and did not have a clear plan to find a dream job, so I chose my major believing "God" wanted me to do it (maybe he did after all, given my spiritual beliefs now). So I decided to go into fields that quite frankly don't pay, with no jobs available. And then I became an atheist right around the time I graduated, and boom, blackpilled. 

So how did I react? Well, I radicalized. But I've always been the type to march to the beat of my own drummer. Being autistic, I don't follow the crowd, I hate crowds. I don't follow social conventions that make no sense. I make my own social conventions even if they make me unpopular, and I never got the whole cult of work. If work is such a miserable thing, we all want to do, why do we continue to do it? I would look at Obama get up there in his second term and go on about creating jobs, and I'm just like, who really wants to do these jobs? Why are we doing this? Isn't this just...republicanism? More trickle down nonsense? A market recovery. In a market that's broken. The solution to not having enough work is to...make more work. What kind of sick society is this?

I felt like I lived in the USSR in the 1980s. You know, we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. We all put up with this system that treats us like crap, and we're so alienated from it, to use a Marx term, but we have no choice but to play along. 

After discovering basic income, I just never could go back to living in the "cave" that was my former reality. I've gone full on absurdist. Our society is this grandiose version of the myth of sisyphus in action. Just pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity. And if you don't have a rock, we'll try to make you one so you too can achieve the american dream of futile labor in exchange for currency!

I mean, I just got so existentially mindscrewed by this whole experience that I just...can't any more. I can't pretend to want to go back to normal. To have a normal capitalist system that "works". Even if I like markets, I don't like capitalism. I don't like the idea of work. I always hated it. And knowing that my former conservative beliefs were an illusion, I'd instead rather seek full unemployment than employment.

So yes, I guess I am lazy, I am entitled, but you know what? Screw this system, and if you shame me for my views screw you too. I can't see how anyone should want to continue as things are. Same with COVID. COVID just showed me all along I was right. We shut down 1/3 of our economy overnight and we weren't greatly materially worse off for it. If anything, I like the lockdown lifestyle. I don't desire much more in life materially speaking. I don't wanna go back to normal, although I understand why others do. And it just showed me, we could do things differently after all, if only we organized our society differently.

If I feel any purpose in this world at all, it's sharing this anti work message. I don't have a dream job or a dream calling. My only calling seems to be wanting to shift us to a world without work. 

Not everyone is like me, though

Here's something I notice. Everything about my views are very...autistic. I don't desire social interaction, or things extraverts like very much. Work is often a very...social experience. Having money and engaging in relative luxuries are social events. And me, not being social, can do without that stuff. My aversion to work is also very autistic. Most people get bored if they don't work, as studies often show. Many people get hay fever being locked up in their houses. Many people want to go back to "normal", pre pandemic. And that's the key to why my ideas would work. Sure, if everyone was like me, society wouldn't function and you would need to force people to work. But, for most people, basic income would only be a springboard. Most people wouldnt be satisfied to sit in their apartment all day eating ramen and watching netflix. They want to experience things. And work is a way for them to acquire more money to live more fulfilling lifestyles. So yeah, just because I'm a lazy person, doesn't mean most people are. I'm literally the exception, not the norm. I literally am a walking stereotype in ways most people aren't. I just want to make that clear. I'm literally a person of extremes. I'm not "normal", I'm not "average".

But what about the labor shortage?

We've talked about this a lot on here, but people keep pushing the idea people are lazy because of the so called "labor shortage".

Yeah, things are complicated. Again, despite economic theory telling you otherwise, including some stuff I wrote, there isn't much evidence that unemployment benefits are causing people to not work. The problem is more complicated than that.

First of all, we have supply issues at the moment due to the economy opening back up too fast.

Second of all, many people can't go back to work if they're forced to stay home and take care of kids. 

Third of all, many of these jobs are paying like garbage and treat people like garbage. After existing in a decade in the dystopian labor market, I love the fact that people are showing dignity and demanding not to be abused while being underpaid. The problem here is rich people shedding crocodile tears wanting cheap wage slaves to run their businesses.

Fourth, there may be a skill mismatch between the people on unemployment and the jobs there are shortages in, ie, the people who are unemployed aren't in the market to do fast food wage slave work. 

So, let's be honest. These are extreme circumstances that are directly related to the consequences of being shut down for a year and then trying to open everything up all at once. If you dont do it gradually, you might run into shocks as the supply doesn't meet the demand and the demand doesn't meet the supply. It happens. Which is why we shouldn't be serious about being fully back to "normal" until around August/September. 

Conclusion

That said, myself not withstanding, and being an extremely unique case, no, most millennials are not lazy. They just want a fair shake. I am, admittedly, lazy, but I'm been blackpilled down this absurdist approach to the modern economy causing me to see the futility of it all and wanting systemic change more radical than most. Also, I'm likely autistic and likely find neurotypical capitalist social conventions all the more intolerable as a result. I don't speak for most people. Heck, I speak for almost no one. Even if I am an ally to millennial causes, as I've expressed on this blog over the past few months since the election, I do things my way, for better or for worse, and I'm willing to break ranks with this upcoming democratic socialist mentality if I don't feel it advanced my agenda. I go along with it because it does advance at least parts of it and wants to make the world a better place, but as you can tell, I have some fundamental disagreements with it. 

Honestly, I have disagreements with all of the old ideologies, because as bob black said, they all believe in work. Capitalism believes in work. Democratic socialism believes in work. Neoliberalism believes in work. Communism believes in work. They just all have different ways to approach work, and I just dislike the concept. Maybe I am a lazy millennial, but at least I'm honest.

Funding Medicare for All

 Now that I got basic income out of the way again, I'm going to take another crack at funding medicare for all. I think I can do it in a way that works this time. If not, well, there's always medicare extra for all.

This plan is going to take a bit from multiple M4A plans I previously looked at. I don't know exactly how much M4A will cost, but I'm going to aim for the $1.75-2 trillion mark with funding, based on the Sanders and Warren plans. Without further ado, let's get to it.

7.5% employer side payroll tax- $520 billion per year

This plan is lifted right from Bernie's medicare for all plan, which will make up the bulk of this proposal. This payroll tax does not count against the laffer curve for taxation of the rich, because it is an employer side tax. Workers never see this tax and it does not factor into their calculations. However, it could theoretically influence hiring habits. Still, given how much a disincentive employer based health insurance seems to be for many industries, it seems like this is an improvement.

4% tax on income - $547 billion per year

This is similar to Bernie's 4% tax on households. However, given UBI exists in my ideal world, and this plan is intended to complement my basic income plan, we won't need to exempt income. Basic income is the exempt income. If we apply a 4% tax to all income sources minus social security as per my basic income plan, we would have a tax base of $13.684 trillion. At 4%, this could be expected to bring in $547 billion per year.

Corporate tax rate increase - $240 billion per year

Both Sanders and Warren expected to raise the corporate tax rate and raise around $290-300 billion depending on the plan. Biden's plan can be expected to raise the corporate tax rate by around $52 billion a year over the next 10 years, so I'm going to assume that by implementing far more full throated changes, we could bring in probably roughly $240 billion in revenue. 

Wealth tax - $275 billion per year

Elizabeth Warren estimates being able to bring in $275 billion a year from a wealth tax. I'm going to stick with this plan and use it to fund healthcare. 

Repealing tax exemptions for health insurance - $140 billion per year

Elizabeth Warren believes that $140 billion could be raised from tax exemptions being repealed that currently go to people paying for health insurance. Since they no longer need to do this, that income can be taxed normally.

Elimination of the Overseas Contingency Operations Fund - $80 billion per year

This is a Warren led initiative to eliminate a specific fund related to defense spending that is targetted toward operations in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. You know, the kinds of places we should no longer be wasting resources or manpower occupying because it's time to end the War on Terror already.

For the 99.8% Act - $34 billion per year

Bernie Sanders wants to crack down on the estate tax, making it far stricter.

Excise taxes - $33 billion per year

I would implement the suggested excise taxes implemented in the Medicare for America Act, which, given the current revenue raised, I estimate would likely raise around $33 billion per year. 

To break down my logic:

Tobacco- Currently we bring in $12.5 billion per year from excise taxes on tobacco. I estimate that the Medicare for America changes would double it, giving us an additional $12.5 billion in revenue.

Alcohol- Currently we bring in $10 billion per year and Medicare for America would radically change the tax rates. Some stuff would not go up much, but some things would be increased by a favor of 16. I'm not sure how to weigh this stuff so I would just estimate bringing in another $10 billion this way.

Sugary drinks- It's unclear how much revenue we would bring in from the tax on sugary drinks, but in line with alcohol and tobacco, I would guess $10 billion or so. I'll just go with that for now. 

Total revenue - $1.869 trillion per year

This is smack dab in the middle of my projections, and if we need more money, there are other places we can tap. For example, Warren believes we could raise $230 billion from improving tax enforcement (which we should be doing anyway), which would push us over the $2 trillion mark. She also believes we could bring in $40 billion from immigration reform, for example.

I also have not touched capital gains either here or with my basic income plan. This is largely because I suspect my UBI plan will be taxing those sources of income at a higher rate and given the relatively low laffer curve peaks on capital gains I don't want to be too greedy. 

But yeah. The numbers work in theory, and I'm sure whatever errors are made, either here, with my basic income plan, can be corrected easily. I have room, and these plans are a lot easier to implement in practice than their raw dollar amounts suggest they would be. Most plans other than this that I would like to implement are relatively small, and I saved funding mechanisms explicitly for that. I'm also not even going to bother with infrastructure, housing, or childcare/preK, as I'm happy with the Biden plans on those. However, given Biden is lacking sorely on education, I likely would want to focus on that too. 

As for education, since it doesn't deserve its own article, I largely just support Bernie's plan, which is funded primarily from a tax on wall street, which is why I did not use such a tax on this or basic income.

Funding a universal basic income, 5th edition (May 2021)

So, I'm already updating my basic income plan slightly after deciding to mess with the numbers on things and do things slightly differently this time. I'll largely be copy/pasting large amounts of what I did with my previous plan as it's only 2 months old, but I'll be updating certain aspects of it too, to make the funding go a bit more smoothly. 

So what's the target amount for this basic income?

The poverty line is $12,880 with an additional $4,540 per extra member of a household. That said, the basic income needs a raise. For the purpose of this article, the amount will be set at $1,100 a month, or $13,200 a year for adults, with an additional $400 a month, or $4,800 a year for children.

Who gets this basic income?

Every adult citizen or long term legal resident over the age of 18 gets the full basic income, and any child who is a citizen or dependent of a citizen or long term legal resident will receive the partial basic income for children. 

As of 2019, there are 255,220,373 adults in the US, and 73,039,150 children in the US. There are roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Let's assume 8.5 million are adults, and 2.5 million are children, roughly. In addition there are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the US. This means roughly 244,420,373 adults and 70,539,150 children would be eligible for basic income.

How much will it cost?

Based on the above information:

244,420,373*13200 = $3,226,348,923,600

70,539,150*4800 = $338,587,920,000

Basic income will cost a total of $3,564,936,843,600, or to put it simply, $3.565 trillion

 So how will we pay for it?

The snapshot for paying for it is as follows.

Spending cuts

$275 billion from welfare cuts

$156 billion from military cuts

$238 billion from eliminating tax credits

+                                                          

$669 billion from spending cuts

Taxes

$187 billion from carbon tax

 $2.736 trillion from 17% flat tax on all earned and taxable income

+                                                         

 $2.923 trillion from taxes

Together

$669 billion from spending cuts

$2.923 trillion from taxes

+                                                        

$3.592 trillion to fund a UBI ($27 billion surplus)

Spending cuts

Many spending cuts can be drawn from the existing social safety nets. I know this will be controversial for a lot of people, but I want to ease peoples' fears here. These numbers will be drawn in a way to ensure we only cut programs that are worth less than basic income, and to cut programs larger than UBI only in ways that would make people on those programs at least as well off as they are today. I want to take a scalpel and do surgery to the current safety net, not just hacksaw it to death in some right wing neoliberal plot like some progressives think. I want this basic income to make people better off, and not worse off.

Based on USgovernmentspending.com, $365 billion from the federal government includes "other welfare", meaning welfare other than social security and medicare/medicaid. $274.7 billion is spend on "families and children". I'm guessing this is stuff like SNAP, WIC, etc. I will cut all of it. I will keep the 54.2 billion in housing, because let's be honest, section 8 provides much more value than $1100 a month in a lot of cases. I'll be keeping unemployment this time, but treating it as taxable income later on, so we will only save $275 billion. 

This time around I will not be cutting social security. I would rather tax it. The 28% cut I had last time might have made seniors at least as well off, but given I tax their income instead at the rate I tax regular income, they will likely save money and be better off. I'll draw less revenue from them, but again, taxing social security is probably easier than cutting it, while leaving seniors and the disabled better off than under my previous plan.

I want to address military spending. We spent $767.1 billion in defense, whereas in the Obama era, which in itself deserved a cut, we spent $611 billion. Just reversing Trump's military spending increases that we didn't need would give us $156 billion. That should still be more than enough to keep ahead of our largest geopolitical foes like Russia and China. 

Finally, I want to remove some major tax credits that exist currently.  After all, if we have UBI, we won't need them. The ones I will cut will include the child tax credit ($118 billion) and the earned income tax credit ($70 billion). Biden's child tax credit expansion also costs an additional $50 billion a year so I'll redirect that too. I could remove more, but many of those tax credits I would rather save for when I want to fund healthcare potentially. This will save us an additional $238 billion.

I originally was going to eliminate the standard deduction, raising $207 billion, but that would raise taxes significantly on the poor, effectively adding a 10-12% tax burden on "low incomes", which might put the poor in a worse off situation at times than they are now. That said I'm scrapping this aspect of my proposal.

All in all, this means:

$275 billion from welfare cuts

$156 billion from military cuts

$238 billion from eliminating tax credits

+                                                          

$669 billion from spending cuts

This means total reductions in spending would amount to a whopping $669 billion. Reducing existing tax credits and deductions really helped a lot!

Raising the rest of the revenue from taxes

At this point, we reduced the amount of money that needs to be raised to $2.896 trillion.

A smaller tax that might be good would be a carbon tax bringing in roughly $187 billion a year.

I was considering expanding the social security tax cap here as that would hit the rich harder, but I'm concerned about taxes hitting the laffer curve if I do, and I still want to tax them on healthcare, so I'm leaving that out.

Beyond that point, we got to look at income, payroll, and VAT taxes. I will not be doing VAT, because I don't believe it's a good way to tax people. Andrew Yang did it, but it's basically a regressive consumption tax that could end up eating into the very UBI we give people. I want to tax people based on what they earn, similar to a clawback mechanism you would find in a negative income tax. So I'm going to go with an overall payroll tax when applicable, where people pay income taxes if they don't pay payroll taxes. I'd prefer payroll as much as possible though because it basically takes the taxes out of peoples' paychecks with minimal effort for them.

To figure out how much income is there, we have to turn to the Bureau of Economic Analysis' "Personal Income and Outlays" chart. I am specifically looking at table 1. In January 2021, total wages and salaries make up $9.967 trillion and should be taxable. However, employer contributions on various public and private funds are not. Personal income receipts on assets seems to be capital gains and income from retirement funds that weren't previously taxed. That said, I would consider it taxable. That's an additional $2.868 trillion. Unemployment benefits are considered taxable, so that's another $571 billion. I'll also be including social security here, as I did not cut it above. That's $1.105 trillion. Proprietors' income with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments is small business revenue and not all of that is taxable. As a matter of that they will have to deduct the vast majority of their earnings as business expenses, so their profits are far less than the amount shown. Based on research they typically pay taxes on about 22% of their income after deductions. That gives us $359 billion in profits that are taxable. With rental income given that the median rent in the US is $1097 and your typical profit is $300, I'm going to assume 27% of the $811 billion is taxable, giving us $219 billion.

Adding that all up:

$9.967 trillion in wages and salaries

$2.868 trillion in investment/dividend income

$0.571 trillion in unemployment benefits

$1.105 in social security benefits

$0.359 trillion in small business income

$0.219 trillion in rental income

+                                               

$14.789 trillion in taxable income

I was really selling myself short on my previous plan, especially with small business and rental income.

At this point, we only need $2.709 trillion to fund UBI.

Applying a flat tax across all income, including the parts we just taxed, that's a 18.3% tax on all income, but I'm going to move it to 18.5% for the sake of simplicity.

Adding that up:

$187 billion from a carbon tax

$2.736 trillion from a 17% tax on all earned income

+                                                 

$2.923 trillion in total tax revenue

How UBI affects real people

Like my previous plan I'm going to test how this plan impacts every day people. You can test your own situation with this formula.

#Adults in household($13,200) + #Children in household($4,800) - income from all sources mentioned above(.185) = total net income after transfers

Admittedly this does not include the effects of losing the EITC or child tax credits, but UBI is still far more generous than any of those and seems to mostly apply to children looking at the benefit structure.

Single adult, no job

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $0

Taxes: $0

Net Income: $13,200

Single adult, minimum wage

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $15,080

Taxes: $2,790

Net Income: $25,490 (69% increase in income)

Single adult, median income ($36,000)

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $36,000

Taxes: $6,660

Net Income: $42,540 (18% increase in income)

Single adult,break even point ($71,351)

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $71,351

Taxes: $13,200

Net Income: $71,351

Single adult, $100,000

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $100,000

Taxes: $18,500

Net Income: $94,700 (5% effective tax rate)

Single adult, $250,000

UBI: $13,200

Wages: $250,000

Taxes: $46,250

Net Income: $216,680 (13% effective tax rate)

Family of four (2 adults, 2 children), no job

UBI: $36,000 ($13,200 + $13,200 + $4,800 + $4,800)

Wages: $0

Taxes: $0

Net Income: $36,000

Family of four, median income ($69,000)

UBI: $36,000

Wages: $69,000

Taxes: $12,765

Net Income: $92,235 (34% increase in income)

Family of four, break even point ($194,595)

UBI: $36,000

Wages:$194,595

Taxes: $36,000

Net Income: $211,764

Family of four, $500,000

UBI: $36,000

Wages: $500,000

Taxes: $92,500

Net Income: $443,500 (11% effective tax rate)

Two average social security recipients ($3086/month)

UBI: $26,400

Social Security: $37,032

Taxes: $6,851

Net Income: $56,581 (53% increase in income)

Two social security recipients, maximum benefit ($7,790/month)

UBI: $26,400

Social Security: $93,480

Taxes: $17,294

Net Income: $102,586 (10% increase in income)

Most people are vastly better off on this plan versus my previous plan. Admittedly the tax credits weren't included in this analysis, but those mostly target lower to middle income families with children. And given my UBI is $4800 each, and it's unconditional regardless of benefit level, you're most likely going to be better off. Biden's child tax credit offered up to $3600 for a child, and the EITC offers wildly varying amounts depending on income. In a handful of situations you could argue the EITC and child tax credit are more generous than my childrens' UBI, but at the same time the adult UBI makes it no competition. Just to compare the best case scenarios head to head:

Single mom, 3 children, earning $20,000 a year

UBI: $27,600

Wages: $20,000

Taxes: $3,700

Net income: $43,900

Old system

Wages: $20,000

Child tax credit: $10,800 ($3,600 each)

EITC: $6,660

Net income: $37,460

That said on basic income, that family is 17% better off. That said, I don't wanna hear from progressives about how I'm so horrible for removing those tax credits because I hear this stuff constantly from "progressives" whining about everything. This is the best your system does. Sorry, mine works better. Deal with it.

Conclusion

I'm still going to refer people to version #4 if people want a simplier version of my idea. This version is more complicated. But still, I feel like it's more comprehensive and the numbers just work better. My previous plan was a bit too cautious if anything. I lowballed the numbers I could draw funding from, and did things in less than ideal ways. I like this version better.

Discussing the real problems with Yang's UBI from a UBI supporter's perspective

 I know, I've done this one before to some extent, but that was primarily melded with my third UBI plan in which I spent more time trying to fix it. This is more a follow up of my previous article defending UBI and specifically, at times, Yang's UBI, from criticism from outsiders, particularly "progressives" and even leftists. This time, I'm going to, as someone who makes my own UBI plans and feels qualified to talk about this, delve deep into Yang's UBI plans and discuss them in detail, looking at what he did, trying to understand why he did it, and look at how it works, and how it doesn't. 

Taxes

First, let's look at how he pays for his basic income. 

10% VAT

The VAT is his primary funding mechanism, expected to raise $987 billion. It's a 10% VAT, half the European level, and attempts to be the primary clawback mechanism Yang uses to pay for his dividend. This idea is controversial, seeing how the VAT is a "regressive tax", meaning it impacts the poor more than the rich. The VAT being flat, hits the rich and the poor at the same rates, but the rich are more likely to save their income and not spend it, while the poor are more likely to save every dollar. To be fair, not all products are subject to VAT, and the figures on the "freedom dividend" site so some basic necessities are exempt, meaning taxes will be lower on the poor. It should be noted that VAT with a UBI IS progressive. The VAT itself might not be, but with a UBI, it gives most people money back and then some. And given a $12,000 a year UBI with a 10% VAT, one would need to spend $120,000 to effectively pay into the UBI. On an individual level, less than 10% of the populace would be funding UBI in this way. That's extremely progressive.

My big issue with a VAT though, relative to an income tax, is that the VAT can very well eat into the UBI itself. It's unclear how much it will do so since at least some of the stuff people will buy will not be subject to the VAT at that income level, but it's very well possible people will be paying some of the income back with this tax. That said, Yang's UBI could, in practice, be worth as little as $10,800. This is why I go with an income tax in my own proposals. I get Yang's logic of taxing transactions to allow for taxing companies, but despite that framing, it's basically an effective sales tax on consumers. So, that's the real problem with this idea. It's not the fact that it's flat and "regressive", the "rich" actually do pay quite a bit into it in practice. It's just that, when you have any social program, you need some phase out mechanism, and this is the primary one Yang chose. It's not what I would have chosen given the fact that it reduces the effective value of the UBI itself, but the effect is still progressive in practice.

Tax revenue from pushed up income

The freedom dividend site mentions because UBI would top off peoples' income, it would push people into higher brackets in their income tax. This would raise $207 billion per year. You know, I find this odd. Is UBI considered taxable income under income tax on Yang's plan?! My own plan didn't do that, and I find this problematic as it further erodes the basic income itself. This basically would make the UBI itself subject to a 10-12% tax (although people may pay less in practice), and potentially bump some people up into a higher bracket with extra income.

EDIT: due to the standard deduction, this would effectively be not taxable, but would push up any earned income to taxable levels. My bad. Also, stealing this idea for my own plan in my own way as it's brilliant. 

New revenue from cap removal on social security payroll tax

Yang would remove the cap on social security payroll tax, which impacts primarily the rich. This would bring in an additional $120 billion a year. I like this, and this is a progressive approach to taxation that impacts primarily the top 10% of the population. Given the cap is $142,800, this is progressive as fudge. I like this. 

New carbon tax & dividend

Literally also in my plan. Would raise $176 billion in his calculations. I approve.

New financial transaction tax

I've always wondered if these taxes would bring in revenue, and I know I've toyed around with this with Bernie's proposals. Yang claims he would get $50 billion from one, and this doesn't seem like an unrealistic number. If it works, it works.

Capital gain/carried interest tax

Essentially Yang tries to remove special treatment for capital gains and carried interest taxes, and expects to raise $49 billion this way.

Funny how the opponents of UBI always focus on the VAT being "regressive" but they ignore all these progressive taxes aimed at the rich. 

Discussion on taxes on the whole

Yang's plan is a bit hit and miss on taxation. The VAT is regressive on paper, but hardly tells the whole story. It actually does have exemptions for some necessities, and while I consider it an inefficient tax, given his approach to funding UBI in this way, it only actually negatively impacts the top 6% of earners or something. I mean, the problem with the VAT is that UBI itself should NOT be taxed itself. That is regressive, and it undermines the very UBI you're giving people. His plan attempts to mitigate this but I wonder if it would actually work in practice.

Still, Yang does do a lot of interesting things that I was not even aware of. He would raise capital gains taxes, remove the cap from social security, implement a financial transactions and carbon tax, and all of these taxes would be progressive. No one talks about these when bashing Yang. They just crap on Yang without thinking about it. These taxes on the whole come up to about $1.59 trillion a year, and that's...not terrible. Of course we also need to fund the other roughly half of a UBI his plan would cost. So let's see how he wants to do that.

Fiscal savings

Now let's look at what he cuts from the federal government as it exists.

Overlap with welfare

Yang expects to raise $161.6 billion from removing overlapping welfare. You see, rather than cutting welfare, Yang expects people to choose between welfare and the freedom dividend, and while some programs like social security are excluded from this, this is his way of cutting welfare without eliminating the programs.

If anything I think these calculations are low. My own UBI plan had this number around $290 billion, although I cut many programs outright. Still, this is better than the original $500-600 billion I remember him proposing, which seems nuts.

A lot of the left criticizes this proposal in particular, but here's the thing. He doesn't want to cut welfare outright, he wants it to be there for those who want it. But let's be honest, many would move from welfare to UBI given how much welfare sucks. I do think there is one weakness of Yang's plan here mine does not have and that's the fact that a lot of welfare is aimed at single moms with lots of kids, and given Yang does not have a UBI for kids, his program might not be as good for that group of people. So many single moms might choose to remain on current benefits given FD can't adequately replace them. He really should have a childrens' UBI. If he did, I bet this number would be much higher and many programs could just be eliminated outright like my program does.

Savings from bureaucratic downsizing

Now this is an interesting aspect of the FD I didn't think about. He would save roughly $49 billion from bureaucratic downsizing. Traditional welfare programs require bureaucrats to dish out the goods, and with UBI being unconditional, those people are no longer needed, so we could let go tons of these guys from their jobs. I think he might be overzealous here, but he also is slashing the bureaucracy in other ways not included in the welfare aspect of it. I have mixed feelings on this one. I mean, sure, there's a lot of waste in our government, but whenever republicans start slashing benefits it often gets in the way of people doing their jobs. Yang ensures this will not happen, but it seems like wishful thinking. Not sure I like this one.

Savings from reduced healthcare spending

Yang expects to reduce healthcare spending by $110 billion. He bases this on the mincome experiment reducing healthcare costs when UBI was implemented there. However....this seems a bit...sketchy. Were the feds spending this much on healthcare here? I mean, sure there's savings, but who saves? Not sure it's the federal government. There is math here discussing how 37% of spending is from federal sources, and then 8.5% was reduced, which is how he got that number, but that seems a bit lazy. A large portion of federal spending is from medicare, and seniors already got social security, so will we really be reducing costs this much? At best I'd give him half of this number, focusing primarily on medicaid spending. 

Savings from homelessness decrease

Yang expects to save $6 billion from reducing homelessness. However, his numbers rely on the fact that taxpayers pay $36k a year on each homeless person given all of the services spent. However, this ignores the fact much of this is likely spent at the local level. You can't just claim that that would save money on the federal level. So this is a fuzzy number.

Savings from property crime reduction

Same thing. Not sure this would be realized federally.

Federal revenue from 5-10% high school dropout reduction

Well it is federal, so I guess it counts.

Final thoughts on cost savings

These numbers seem a bit...questionable at times. I mean, to be fair on welfare I feel like he errs on the side of caution and his numbers are too low, but on other things he just plucks these savings out of thin air in the sense that while these things would save society money, that doesn't necessarily mean they will be realized as tax revenue. Still, this section is less unrealistic than I recall it being, and most of these savings would likely be realized. 

He estimates $327 billion per year here, which isn't an unrealistic number. if I recall it was previously like $500-600 billion but I think he changed his mind on social security so he updated these numbers. Seems fair.

Economic growth

Yang expects to raise $558 billion from economic growth increasing tax revenues. This part of his plan is flat out shady. While he may or may not be right, I hate relying on economic growth in this way. Economic growth can increase but so do our obligations, and quite frankly, this is relying on deficit spending to pad out the freedom dividend. I do not like this idea. It might work out that way, but you know what? Reagan said the same thing about trickle down and look at where the national debt is now. 

This section I'm going to have to criticize Yang harshly.

Net Cost

Oh come on, the dude is basically talking about printing money at this point, this is ridiculous. Bad Yang. Bad. ($321 billion)

Summarizing and fixing the actual problems I see

First of all, the big elephant in the room is the deficit spending. He is almost $1 trillion short on funding roughly by my estimations. $558B from his "economic growth" section, $321B from his "net cost" section, and potentially another $100B from his fiscal savings section. This isn't good. If we don't fund a basic income via taxes or fiscal savings, it is going to be deficit funded, and that is going to be inflationary. Yang's numbers are well thought out in some ways, but sometimes he just doesn't connect how this saves the federal government money, or ignores the fact that it will take years to achieve that economic growth meaning that in the process we're just adding to the national debt or printing money. His plan is very stimulative, and it might actually be so in a negative way.

That said, Yang needs a more robust funding mechanism, potentially raising the VAT to 20%...which...gets me into another issue with him.

His VAT. I don't like the VAT for reasons different than other people who don't like the VAT. It's not that it's a "regressive" tax in how progressives define it, it's the fact that while Yang did try to make exemptions for basic goods, it's going to trickle down and tax the UBI itself. Assuming no exemptions, a $12000 UBI is actually worth $10800 with a 10% VAT and $9600 with a 20% VAT. It's still progressive, but it potentially hurts the people UBI is supposed to help. Which is a huge reason I go the income/payroll tax route and only hit income from labor.

On him choosing between welfare and UBI, I don't think that's bad with one exception. His UBI is only given to adults, and I know many people on welfare are single moms, and kids under 18 don't get the UBI. So large families will suffer moving to UBI. This wouldn't exist under my own plan as I fund UBI for children too. However, for a single adult, or a family with multiple adults, as I pointed out yesterday UBI should be a far superior option.

If I were to give a grade to his UBI plan, what would I give it? Eh, a C- I think. If he didn't have the funding issues I'd bump it to a B. It does some good things. I want to like it. I really do. But this just keeps reminding me of why I end up being repulsed from Yang in practice. I love his ideology. I love his core platform, but the dude isn't good at policy. And his UBI has flaws on it. I love and respect the dude for raising UBI's profile and bringing it into the mainstream, but his actual plan is weak on details, as are many of Yang's ideas in practice. 

I'm sorry to any leftie who comes across this and was turned off from Yang's UBI. We're not all like this. I'm not even convinced Yang even realizes what this plan does. He seems naive and ignorant as fudge at times. Not all UBI plans are like this, and there are pretty easy fixes to his plans' weaknesses, many of which are implemented in my own plan.

Still, is Yang's plan BAD? Well, outside of the funding holes, no. Despite its flaws, it would be very beneficial to many people and I still would support it. I would structure things differently, have a higher flat tax, and fund it from the income/payroll side of things, while exempting UBI itself from taxes. This would make it far more progressive. But at the same time if I were forced to say yay/nay in its current state the only thing that would really make me say "nay" is the funding holes. Assuming those are taken care of I would approve it. You're never gonna have anyone agree with you 100% after all, I can compromise with someone giving me a somewhat flawed implementation of what I want. 

Still, my plan is better, and I'm not going to pretend it's even close.