Discussing Bernie Sanders vs Marianne Williamson

 So yesterday I finished Marianne Williamson's book "A politics of love". Today I started Bernie Sanders' "It's okay to be angry about capitalism." I'm not super far into it yet, only around chapter 2 somewhere, but I just want to comment on one very significant difference between the two that I notice first off, which really sums up why I like Bernie so much better than Marianne. 

Marianne's book was a mixed affair for me. It was overly emotional and focused heavily on love and empathy, while offering very few actual policy prescriptions for our problems. Bernie is the opposite. This dude comes out of the gate discussing problems and solutions. And not only does he make his case, but he does it with force and conviction. It's pretty clear, reading his work, compared to Marianne, why I was so much more passionate about Bernie than I am about Williamson. And it's pretty clear even why I ended up backing Bernie over Andrew Yang, who, by the way, I actually agree a lot more with.

Bernie is practically the perfect candidate. He provides an entire worldview outlining the problems with the current system, while calling for a specific set of solutions. He does it forcefully, and with conviction. He speaks with a charisma that almost makes me want to overlook the fact that he prefers a jobs guarantee over a UBI. Almost. He's the OG. He's the dude who's been in the trenches his entire life, and despite our differences, I have trouble not having the utmost respect for him.

I knew that he was going to be hard to replace, as he passes 80, and becomes too old to run for president again, but looking at where we are now, I feel bad that we've passed up on such a transformational candidate. 

I may have issues with his movement. Quite frankly, I've come to realize a lot of aspects of his movement are toxic. And despite him being quite clear that his agenda is basically FDR's second bill of rights, a lot of his base is more radical and extreme than he is, with some of them calling for literal socialism. And honestly, these guys picked fights with me, and have alienated me. So I'm not entirely sure his movement is going to age well going forward. Often when the torch is passed on, each subsequent leader sucks worse than the last. FDR passed it to truman, who passed it to JFK, who passed it to Johnson, who passed it to Carter. And we're seeing a clear downward spiral as the GOP shifted from Reagan, to Bush, to the other Bush, and eventually to the tea party and Trump. The original guy seems to have a level of charisma and conviction that's refreshing and cant be matched, but then subsequent leaders suck. They might parrot the same ideals, but might lack the conviction, or the leadership style, or might be corrupt, or heck, they might not even represent the ideas at some point, but a pathetic copy cat of them. And as Bernie passes the torch on, I fear for his movement. Williamson isn't really it. Neither is Biden, although many would argue Biden was never going to be, despite including aspects of Bernie's agenda in his platform.Nina Turner didn't go anywhere. And a lot of the younger progressives just tend to lack the expertise that Bernie has on policy, even if they have the passion. 

The same is happening to the UBI movement. I mean, Scott Santens is the OG. I'm arguably influenced by Scott Santens and others in a direct sense, and have a worldview that is a mix of the most leading UBI oriented thinkers. But then you got Yang, who had the same ideas roughly, but lacked the policy expertise, and at times the conviction to follow through. As the movement materialized in reality, the leaders we often had to rally behind tended to "not be it". And over time, this kills movements, because a string of bad leaders can turn people off of ideas, and then a new zeitgeist emerges. Or maybe things just change as years turn into decades, and we become removed from the original event. When Rush LImbaugh wrote of Ronald Reagan in 1992, he seemed very inspired by the guy, and reading his works in the 2000s, I kind also felt inspired by such ideas. But as I matured into an adult, saw the world for myself, and saw a massive disconnect between these ideas and the reality we live in, I ultimately soured on him. I understand why a lot of boomers and gen X are more conservative than me, but Millennials and Zoomers grew up in a totally different era. The divide between growing up post 1990 and pre 1990s is massive. One lived in a cold war world without widespread use of the internet, and the other lived post cold war with the internet. As such, the generations are just...different. We live in different worlds. ANd the ways of the previous generation do not resonate with this one.

Bernie did talk about this, but he seemed convinced that despite his failures, his ideas would live on, since the younger generation loves them. And it's true. Most of Bernie's support comes from the under 40 crowd, me being one of them. I admit, I do have some ideological differences with Bernie, being one of the OG human centered capitalists from before even Yang embraced the idea, but honestly, that's why I'm in a position to appreciate both Bernie Sanders and Andrew yang. And while policy wise I'm more Yang than Bernie, even I have trouble arguing against Bernie's agenda, warts and all, especially given how weak of a leader Yang seems to be. 

Honestly, I fear for the future of both of our movements. The UBI movement, the Bernie movement. The bernie movement's successors come off as totally unhinged and extreme to me, and while marianne williamson isn't anywhere near as bad as the online purity testers I deal with, she still feels quite lacking to me. She just seems to lack the coherent worldview that Bernie has, and seems to lean into spirituality that feels refreshing on the one hand, but also feels empty and vapid on the other. And with UBI, well...we honestly need to do better than Andrew Yang. He's too inconsistent.  

And yeah I just wanted to reflect on why I felt so passionate about Bernie, while I'm so tepid on Marianne. I mean, just reading one book after the other really seals it for me.

Reacting to Marianne Williamson's "A Politics of Love"

 I mean, she's running for president, I have interest in her, I might as well read her book, right?

Ultimately, I have mixed views on it. It kind of reflects the mixed views on her I have in general. On the one hand, her spirituality is refreshing and speaks to the spiritual side of me that exists, but on the other, it just seems to put me off at the same time.

I guess it's because I approach it from the total opposite perspective. She kind of puts "love" at the center of everything, but to some extent it comes off as feels over reals. Like, you can do that, and that's all well and good, but at the end of the day, you need PLANS to get to where you wanna go. We can't just put ideology aside and act like it's not important and call come together and sing kumbaya. Ideology is a guiding light for our values.

It reminds me of a video I came across when I deconverted from Christianity from Evid3nc3's "Why I am no longer a Christian" series. Ya know? Learn things like ethics challenges spiritual and religious perspectives on morality. You learn it's just a lot more complicated than just good vibes or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I feel like at the core of her worldview and her focus on "love", that she's onto something there. Like, I tend to be more technical given my rational mindset where I lean harder into "well the purpose of morality is to enhance well being and reduce suffering" and stuff like that. And while I get her view that we can't just sit around and let people suffer, again, sometimes ethics makes things complicated. She just oversimplifies everything and thinks the world just needs more love to some extent, and it's kind of cringe to me. 

Her perspective on America is even handed, but also kinda naive. Maybe I'm oversimplifying since she grapples with the dark side of our history throughout it, but she has this perspective that America is neither good nor bad, that we have done some wrong things but are soemhow great at the same time, and she seems to focus on the past 40 years in the beginning sections of the book as if everything went wrong since then and it was fine before then. 

Uh...hate to tell you, but the 40 years before the last 40 years were the exception to the rule as far as capitalism goes. Capitalism has always sucked. Yes yes, I know I sound like a leftist despite crapping on leftists, but it's true. Capitalism has always sucked. We happened to reform it good enough where it worked, sorta, and then we regressed. Even during the 1930s-1970s era, capitalism wasn't perfect, as it merely reformed the worst problems, without doing away with the root causes. And yes, this is where I will differ from leftists. No, it's not capitalism itself, it's linking work to income to way too much of a degree that we coerce people into wage slavery. We discussed UBI even at the peak of this golden age, and considered passing it, only to squabble on the details and then regress in the wrong direction. 

The fact is, we need to not just go back to the past, we need to pick up where it left off to some extent and "finish the job". And this is where a yang style human centered capitalism might be better. 

Speaking of human centered capitalism, she kinda gets it. She did advocate for a form of it, even using the kind of terms that I would in which we don't exist for it, it exists for us. But yeah, her actual economic prescriptions seem a bit more Bernie like at times. 

And then she got into different groups. Children, calling them angels. I mean, I get it, child suffering in America sucks, but I feel like sometimes people focus WAAAY too much on children. Like it's the flaw of her emotional mindset. And it's a larger flaw in the left. We always push for school lunches, and child tax credits, and means tested aid aimed at single mothers with children, but then our perspective seems to be the second you turn 18, F U, you're on your own. THat's just the perspective I get. "ABAWDs" (able bodied adults without independents) get screwed hard by our existing safety nets. And the left often gets fixated on helping the groups of people they deem deserving or worthy of help, while not helping everyone else. When I see williamson here, I see clinton. And I already ripped Clinton hard for this when she ran.

Again, this is the flaw of Williamson's mindset. Everything is feels. Everything is love and empathy and feels, and while you need some level of that to be a decent human being, if that's all you have, then your perspective is lacking direction. It's easy to manipulate such people. It's easy to lose sight of goals, and it's easy to exclude people on the basis of not fitting into the groups you're most sympathetic for. We need ideas that help everyone, not ideas that help SOME PEOPLE.

 This got even worse as she started wading into identity politics with her reparations arguments. Look, I get it. We screwed blacks for the first 100 years of our existence, then we "freed" them, only to institutionally oppress them in other ways. We just said "okay you have your freedom, good luck" and left them to fend for themselves in a crappy envirionment. I might not seem like it, but I get it, I'm sympathetic here.

But, let's discuss reparations a bit. Fredrick Douglass called for 40 Acres and a mule. Why? Because without economic independence, then freed slaves would be forced to go back and work for their former slave owners as "employees". To give people economic independence, they wanted the government to give them money so they wouldnt be forced into wage slavery.

Gee, it sounds like a goal I'm sympathetic toward. Except I dont wanna do this on racial lines. You see, theres a lot of poor whites who are screwed too. Reparations for blacks does nothing for them. Again, we need to get rid of this identity politics nonsense. I mean, our entire approach to fixing the issue for American Americans comes back to the jobs thing. We want them to work, but then their communities dont have jobs, and the jobs dont pay, and they're discriminated against, and the solution is affirmative action type BS that pits blacks and whites against each other over jobs and employment and access to colleges. The solution kind of violates the standards of fairness of whites, and puts them in positions less likely to get jobs and spots in colleges depsite being more qualified (which leads to these guys being in poverty more), but hey, we're just supposed to put up with it because we're "privileged." Not condemning williamson in particular here, but given her mindset, it's not too far off of traditional SJW lefties here, warts and all. And let's not forget that whites would be paying taxes for these reparations, while not getting anything back themselves. If there's anything that stokes resentment in American politics, it's the idea of white taxpayers paying for stuff for minorities for free. Hell, that's what the reagan revolution was really about.

Really, I know Williamson isnt huge on this, but there's a reason we need to stop pushing the race issue. Because there's no winning if we do. It alienates too many people. It just divides us. LOok at our politics, the right is all whites voting for conservative ideas because their hatred for minorities trumps rational policy that actually helps them, and the left is basically minorities, SJWs, and sane people who vote for them because they feel they have to, but dont feel welcome because the politics really "isnt for them" (I'm in the last group, I've expressed my issues with this for years now on here). I mean, pushing for reparations isn't going to deter me from supporting her given she does openly embrace policies that I support, but....I do think that these politics are alienating and we need to stop leaning so hard into this stuff.

Then there's the immigration stuff. Look, I'm an ex right winger. On race and immigration issues, I've deprogrammed myself from more harmful racist/xenophobic ideas. I dont really believe that our emphasis on these issues is important and im not going out of my way to vote against the immigrants like the trumpers and the right do, but I dont really lean into this stuff either. Like if I were writing my own political manifesto (which I've been trying to do this year, only for it to not work well, I do better writing informally on blogs like this), these issues would be footnotes if they made it in at all. ANd I generally hold centrist opinions on them. Like IM not a flaming SJW, but I'm also not a xenophobe or open racist or something either. I'm just a moderate who wants to focus on anything but this. And here we are, focusing on this. I mean it's her book, her political manifesto, she can discuss whatever she wants, but...this isn't doing it for me.

She discusses foreign policy and has views akin to my pre Ukraine views, the idea were spending too much on military and how we have this massive military industrial complex and how we did just fine for most of our history without the massive active military we have...but...we are defending a global empire from authoritarian rivals like Russia and CHina. Our military is massive because it spans the world and we wanna be able to fight a two front war against russia and china simultaneously if we have to. And given Russia just invaded Ukraine, I think that the rational center on this issue has won out, with much of Europe beefing up their military budgets, recognizing they're not prepared for a war against Russia. And honestly, we're the only one with our crap together. And that crap is expensive, but we kinda need it. It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Ya know? Foreign policy isn't just good vibes and singing kumbaya. It ultimately comes down to economics, technology, and force. Yes, as she would say, embrace Theodore Roosevelt's strategy of "speak softly and carry a big stick", but again, I think the world is just more complicated than she gives credit for. 

Also, all things considered, military spending is only 4% of our GDP. Doesnt sound massive in practice, does it? And yes, it can be cut, I wouldnt mind spending $600-700 billion instead of $800-900 billion, but I wouldnt wanna cut it more than that. We need to be prepared in case Russia or China, or both wanna start crap.

But yeah, all in all, my opinion on the book? It was...okay. Like I know I was harsh on it here. I highlighted disagreements. But she also had good points too. I think there is some stuff we can agree upon. But ultimately, her simplistic worldview, and focus on love and emotional type arguments at times just comes off as....basic to me. I really do think her worldview is oversimplified and needs refinement. 

And yeah, this is a huge reason Im not super passionate about her going into 2024. I admit that I have changed a bit from 2016 and 2020. I've leaned more into my ideological roots, and exploring those roots, and dealing with moral dilemmas that those roots have led me to, I have ended up refining my ideas, and I just realize that this makes me shift away from mainstream progressivism a little bit.

But even putting ideology aside, is this the best we can do? In 2016, Bernie has PLANS. He not only had a convincing vision and ideology, but he also had POLICIES for out to get there. And I can disagree with him on priorities at times, but his platform could work, he put a lot of thought into it, and I have to say he had his crap together. 

Williamson seems to lack a lot of policy specifics on her website. She mentions things to some extent, but she also lacks her exact funding plans for how to get there. I'm not even sure she has plans all things considered. I mean, I get that her campaign is a protest campaign vs Biden and the dem establishment, but I really don't think she's as refined as Bernie was. I think she's more emotional, and while she might have convictions based around "love", again, those kinds of emotions without a solid ideological basis or way of getting there can be problematic. 

Idk. Like....I really feel like the left has devolved since 2016. Bernie is too old to run, and captured by the democratic party and "Bidenworld" as I like to call it, and the replacements just aren't as good. 

The centrists are more wonky, but they also suffer a lack of ideological conviction, and if anything have the opposite problem of Marianne at times. 

but yeah. Idk. I just lean hard into the rational, to the point of massively overthinking, whereas I dont think she thinks enough. That's my honest opinion. Might be unpopular, but that's what it is.

Given she conforms to my views more than Biden does I will continue to support her for now, but yeah. I really wish someone better would come along. And in the general, yeah...probably gonna go Biden assuming he wins the nomination.

Responding to Second Thought's "Why Work is Getting Worse"

 So second thought had a video on "why work is getting worse", and I ended up responding to it on a forum. I figured my post would make a good blog post, so let me give me thoughts here:

Ugh, let me just say second thought is kind of a socialist hack who often pisses me off (see: video claiming Yang was a" "bonapartist"). BUT...this is a pretty good video, and I do have strong opinions on this.

My honest opinion? WORK WAS NEVER GREAT! WORK. ###ING. SUCKS! In the early days of the industrial revolution, people were forced into the cities by the enclosure movement and forced to take jobs as wage slaves. Their conditions were brutal and inhumane. And they knew it was wage slavery. Around the time of abolishing literal slavery, there was actually a debate about whether literal or wage slavery was worse. Arguably literal slavery IS worse as in theory people can leave under wage slavery, but we all know in practice that they cant. That's why frederick douglass wanted 40 acres and a mule. The purpose of reparations was to ensure freed african americans ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE. If they had their own land and their own farm equipment, they could take care of themselves, whereas being poor and propertyless often forced them to go back to work for their former slave owners as "employees."

Second thought is right that reformism isn't the answer. We had the labor movement from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s. They did wonderful things to balance power via unions and improve working conditions, and eventually with FDR we did. But, as he pointed out, things declined. Why? Is it "capitalism" as he says? Well...yes...but also no.

The problem is again...work. let's look at what liberalism and social democracy did. They merely REGULATED work. They had the government step in and say, you have to have higher wages, you have to have decent safety conditions, you cant fire people for being in a union, you have to negotiate with a union if available. And while all of this stuff...helped. It never really solved the core problem. The problem being work itself.

I would agree with second thought that all liberalism, at least traditional liberalism does, is regulate an unjust one sided relationship.

But...and this is what's important, I would fundamentally disagree with the left and second thought on the solutions. For a lot of people the answer is "socialism." Workers owning the means of productions and democratically making decisions. THis can help, but the devil is in the details.

First of all, let's just write off any form of socialism a la countries like the USSR and China. Can we just admit that those suck and have horrible records? Clearly autocratic governments should not be given quarter here, because all they did was replace one unjust hierarchy with another.

But, that, to me, is the problem with most forms of socialism, especialyl ones tied to the state owning the means of production. Think about how well our actual democracy works. Think about how we're currently being force fed joe biden again. Is democracy necessarily the answer? Is our democracy actually responsive to peoples' needs? Doesnt it become muddled down in unelected bureaucracies and power structures that control the process while still seemingly delivering on paper? Do you not think socialism would end very much the same?

I dont trust people to be educated and informed enough to make the right decisions. Especially given half the country are still in the mind set of HURR DURR YOU WORKED 60 HOURS A WEEK AND THINK YOU HAD IT BAD? I WORKED 80 HOURS, QUIT BEING SUCH A BABY.

Such mentalities would continue to proliferate even if we had socialism.

Even in market socialism, I dont see a solution. Look at valve, the gaming company. Like that's supposed to be a flat organization without bosses outside our lord and savior, gaben (sorry, PC gamer here). But you know what? People who have left valve HATE working at valve and go on about how it's full of informal hierarchies. Yeah that's what happens.

I dont think the mode of production really matters a ton, because all of them are subject to the same two flaws: coercion, and people. As long as people are forced to participate in work, and are subject to institutions in which others rule over them in some way, and yes, socialism would still have that in their organizational structures, IMO, then people are not free.

So I say we address the actual problem here: work itself. More specifically, coercion to work. The problem with capitalism, socialism, and everything in between is that they all rely on coercion to work. As Bob Black would say they might quibble over hours and who's in charge, but they dont question the idea of work itself.

So how do we secure peoples' freedom? Well, remember how discussed Yang and how second thought hates him? Yang discussed this week that he got a lot of his ideas from scott santens. And scott santens leads the UBI subreddit. A subreddit I've also frequented for years. Yeah, you can see why Im rocking the mah flair here. Heck to go further, I was yang gang before Yang was yang gang. SO let's talk about UBI.

UBI is actually seen by some, as liberating. It's intended to liberate people from forced work. Phillipe Van Parijs was one of the first philosophers to discuss this in the 1980s, he was a marxist trying to reinvent the left in an age of neoliberalism, and he decided to embrace the freedom rhetoric and say, hey, if we give people a UBI, we can free them to live as they want.

Karl Widerquist, an American scholar, goes even further IMO. He argues that UBI gives people the right to say no, not just to any job, but all jobs. While freely chosen employment is not necessarily evil, employment under capitalism, or often socialism for that matter, is not freely chosen.

I would argue with a UBI, capitalism could live up to its promises, because under a UBI oriented capitalism, people could tell their bosses to F off. Bosses wouldnt be able to push them around at all. Because if they felt bullied, they could just tell their bosses to shove their job where the sun doesnt shine and go home.

Ya know? THe ultimate equalizer under capitalism is to give the working class their freedom to not work in the first place, and to make all work voluntary cooperative enterprises.

We should also give people free healthcare, education, and help subsidize housing costs to bolster this to ensure people remain as free as possible.

Now, before people say this can't be done because we need people to work, well, I disagree. Second thought mentioned all of that productivity in his video right? How line on chart went up? Well, what if we took all of that productivity, and instead let people choose fewer working hours? I mean if we have an economy 3x the size of what it was in 1950 per person, we could instead have an economy the size that we did in 1950 per person but work 1/3 the time. Or 13.3 hours a week. Ya know?

Or look what we did during covid. We just decided to close like a third of our economy as it was "nonessential". We really dont need to work as much as we do. Full employment and emphasis on GDP growth is why we do.

Which brings me to my last point. Yang in 2020 ran on human centered capitalism, the idea that humans are more important than money, the idea that the unit of value should be each person, and not each dollar, and that we should move away from GDP as the end all be all measure of the economy.

I know second thought and other "leftists" scoff at the idea, "rawr, capitalism cant be made human, read theory", but in this case, I AM THE FREAKING THEORY.

Because again, if yang got his ideas on UBI and human centered capitalism from scott santens, and scott santens moderates the UBI subreddit, and i participated in that subreddit for years and interacted with the dude, well....wanna hear MY take on human centered capitalism?

My own iteration of the idea starts with a simple premise. That the economy is made for humans, not humans for the economy. If we are made for the economy, then we are slaves to it. No, the economy exists for us, to serve our purposes. We should not be beholden to it as a money making machine. Rather, it serves our needs. This comes from a deep commitment to the ideals of secular humanism in my political thought. No gods, no masters. Our social structures exist to serve us, not the other way around.

I also muse a lot about the nature of work itself in my own form of human centered capitalism. Why work? In protestant christianity, people work for work's own sake or for the glory of god. America's work fixation is arguably a secularized version of that. We treat work and suffering almost as a religious rite, and it's quite counter to my ideology. No, we dont live for work, work exists to serve us. And honestly? We should be spending as little time working as we possibly can IMO. If work sucks and is an evil, and in my worldview it is, then we should strive to eliminate and abolish work over time. I'd be willing to settle for merely making it as voluntary as possible and allowing people to make their own choices though.

But yeah, the second premise to my iteration of human centered capitalism reflects that. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There's nothing special or glorious about work. Existing ideologies fetishize the concept too much. People keep going on about how work gives people meaning and direction and structure in life, and I say let's do away with the pateralism. F work, work sucks, let's work as little as possible. We need a new ideology that instead of thinking about how to organize work, we talk about about liberating people from the concept altogether.

And yeah, that's what human centered capitalism means to me, as someone who has embraced it since 2013-2014 or so. I only pull this card because of how misguided second thought is on the concept of yang and human centered capitalism. He has entire videos crapping on yang and his ideology and as someone who believes similar it drives me nuts. So I just wanted to give MY take on this video as this is a topic im super passionate about.

Explaining why Bernie endorsed Biden

 This is going to sound very much the same as what I say when progressives attack AOC, but here's why Bernie isn't in much of a position to NOT endorse Biden.

The democratic party is a machine. It forces people subject to it to support their candidates. Politics is a system of relationships and crossing the chosen candidate of one of the two big parties tends to burn a lot of bridges. if Bernie does not play the inside game, he loses access to Biden, and Biden will shift center and refuse to do anything for him.

I get why progressives are disappointed. But...Bernie is kind of in a tough place. If we're going to be mounting a challenge against Biden, it has to be people on the outside doing it, people who have nothing to do with the current administration and who the party has no leverage against. Williamson is that person right now. So yeah, we're not gonna get help from Bernie. We're on the outside. Bernie is on the inside. Bernie is sincere as fudge and I dont doubt his convictions for a minute, but he's not in a position to speak up right now. If we want to push for his vision, we have to do it for him. 

This is actually a huge reason I respected Yang for turning down a position in Biden's administration and starting forward. I just wish he didn't merge the party, as that has made him beholden to another party infrastructure that clips the wings of his message.

But yeah. With these guys caught up in the milieu of party politics, we have to be the one to advance the causes. If Yang can't openly advocate for UBI, we have to do it for him. And if we want to mount a challenge to Biden, it has to come from people like us. 

For the primary at least, stay the course. If we dont bend the knee, we're up against the entire party. I have no doubts that we will inevitably lose. The machine's politics are too strong. But, we need to keep trying regardless, if we want to see these politics become mainstream. 

Bernie's sacrifices here have not gone unnoticed. It's quite literally one of the only reasons Biden is a tolerable candidate at all. His build back better is a more practical version of the green new deal. The CTC has been championed by Yang and Scott Santens as a shift toward UBI. Biden forgave some student loans. Bernie and Yang DID shift the discussion to the left a little bit. Future challengers will CONTINUE that trend. If williamson is successful, we'll see Biden shift to the left again. In 2028 hopefully the GOP will get a clue and not be so batcrap insane, and we can more openly challenge the status quo. Heck, if my theory on us undergoing a party realignment is true, 2028 might be our breakout moment where the balance of power tips toward millennials and zoomers and away from gen X and boomers, who are keeping the current moderate trend going. We saw the same thing happen in the 1980s with Reagan after the dem coalition started faltering in 1968. 2016 is the beginning of the breaking up of the existing alignment, and it might take until 2028 or maybe even 2032 for us to fully realize this shift. I just hope it's a shift toward progressivism and not fascism. 

But that said, for now, we need to keep the fascists away from power. Which is why im not going to make a huge fuss come 2024 if I dont get my way. 

Either way, for the primary at least, let's just respect the position that Bernie is in and to do our own advocacy without relying on big name figures like him and Andrew yang. They're not coming to help us this time. Williamson is the best we got. Let's just support her, regardless of what bernie says.

Discussing the Freiburg Institute's conference on UBI vs UBS

 So, I'm subbed to the Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies on youtube as they often put out a lot of high quality academic discussions on UBI related topics. And today they had a discussion on UBI vs UBS. I've been critical of UBS in the past, and while this discussion didn't change my mind at all, it is worth commenting on as they might have provided a more even handed account for it than I have, as I basically blasted it as reminiscent of "communism". 

The backdrop of the discussion is a green economy and what kind of welfare state would be best in a post growth economy. I would argue for a UBI. Heck, I've regularly advocated not just for UBI to give people the right to say no, but also have advocated for reducing work weeks in recent years as well. Given GDP is what it is, and life should be more than number on line go up, it makes sense that as we become more productive, we reduce working hours to give people more leisure rather than just growing like an uncontrolled cancer. This is a good idea for the environment too. As David Graeber wrote shortly before his death, "to save the world, we are going to have to stop working." So yeah. UBI, post growth economy, all of this stuff makes sense for me, and obviously, I want a version of UBI to be at the forefront of this, NOT UBS. 

This discussion seemed biased toward the left, and included a lot of criticisms of UBI including "taking resources away from funding essential services", "be(ing) abolished more easily than UBS", and it "doesn't sufficiently challenge the logic of capitalism", as if that is a bad thing. To respond to each briefly.

1) On other services, I would allow them to continue existing, I do believe some services should complement UBI and believe my own UBI plan actually properly addresses the concerns between UBI and the existing safety nets. 

2) It depends how it's implemented. If you push it as a tax credit and then abolish everything else, yes, repealing one IRS implemented tax refund idea is a lot easier to abolish than 100 agencies all doing different things. But at the same time, when I think UBI I think social security. The "third rail" of politics that no one dares screw with lest they make themselves unelectable. I really think the concern over UBI being abolished easily is really just part of the nonsense "trojan horse" arguments the left throws out there, and isn't based on reality, but based on projections of how bad "capitalism" is and how their ideas are somehow better and magically immune to all pressures.

3) This is going to be going into the larger point I want to make with this article, but whether you support UBI or UBS really is a litmus test for your larger ideology. Who do you distrust more, the state, or markets? For socialist minded people, the answer is capitalism. For the left, everything wrong ever seems to come down to capitalism. Anything under capitalism will inherently be eroded by malevolent forces, whereas everything under socialism is sunshine and rainbows.

But...my perspective is a bit different. Keep in mind, I started off as a small government conservative, and while I have become more positive toward the state's role in the economy, the idea of the government distributing resources directly to people does not inspire much confidence and reminds me of the bread lines of the USSR, or more recently, the government delivering vegetables to peoples' apartments after being welded in because of COVID. I like markets, I like freedom. I understand we cna't have a pure free market, I'm not a right winger after all, but honestly the UBI vs UBS debate really seems to exist on the backdrop of "do you prefer an economy that is primarily capitalistic, with programs and reforms and institutions to curb its worse excesses, or do you want a society that's primarily socialistic with the government having a much more active role in managing the economy?

Another way to put it is this, who do you think has the propensity to screw up more, markets or the state? For leftists, the answer is the market, with the state being the savior. For capitalists, people trust markets over a large and bureaucratic government. 

I still tend to lean toward the capitalist kind of thinking, which is why i dont get along with many kinds of leftists these days. It's also why i was banned from r/antiwork. Despite being anti work, because I failed their purity tests of being a tried and true "leftist", and instead simply want a better form of capitalism, I'm evil to them.

But to me, socialist minded people are misguided. THe more complex government programs and the more bureaucracy behind them, the more there is at risk going wrong, and at worst, they can be purely tyrannical. To go back to the "anti work" idea, my worst fear is that these services will be sabotaged in a million of different ways to make people using such services miserable, and to force people to work. Money, if you notice is what makes up the best of the social programs. Social insurance programs like social security and unemployment use money. Peoples' independence and autonomy is respected, such programs are seen as "entitlements" based on past contributions. Welfare programs often use in kind aid because they believe the poor are too stupid and irresponsible to make their own decisions. Even worse, it seems to come with a certain logic that if you want to be given big boy currency, you need to get a big boy job and freaking earn your way. Meanwhile welfare is created to be intentionally degrading and unattractive to the end user. I fear that this is one potential fate of these universal services. 

Universal services is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but isnt good in reality. It likely would not perform up to ideals. Meanwhile I honestly believe a proper UBI would not create the apocalyptic problems with capitalism that its critics say it will. They just tend to have a hate boner for markets and want the state to run everything, whereas I kinda recognize both institutions have pros and cons and UBI finds the right balance.

To be fair, later in the presentation they admit that UBS might not live up to its ideals. After all, they mention we will need active democratic governance to ensure UBS works properly. But when do we EVER have active citizen oversight of social programs directly? These things are overseen by layers upon layers of bureaucracies and paper pushers that are largely unaccountable to the public. This is one reason to believe UBS will never work as well as expected. 

And even if we had it, I dont trust a lot of people to democratically govern in a direct way. Keep in mind half of the US are conservative. Do you really trust those morons in charge of this stuff? No, we need to implement this idea as a right of all citizens (UBI) and then make it as immune to political screwery as possible. I dont trust the government to do a good job here. The more complex we make ideas the more problems they develop. It's better just to give people cash and then to let them decide what they themselves want.

While there may be issues, for example, they mentioned an overheated housing market...yeah. That happens when people want to buy housing and there isnt enough available. All societies need to ration housing. It's better to do it under capitalist principles because if the USSR has taught us anything it's that it sucked at building housing, and it also restricted freedom of movement to some extent in order to compensate for the issues capitlaism has. Capitalism has more freedom, but sometimes that means that due to supply and demand prices go up. It's better than the socialist alternative. 

They also mentioned from a green perspective that vouchers did a better job at accomplishing green goals than cash, but again, cash gives people freedom to choose within the market, whereas vouchers can only be spent on specific things and are relatively paternalistic and authoritarian approaches to nudging people to make the "right" decisions. UBI being unconditional is supposed to represent freedom. Whereas these lefties kinda want a more traditional paternalistic state.

This is actually the kind of stuff that turned me off as an ex conservative. Like, the idea that the left would basically come in and sieze control of the economy and then use it to force us to live a certain way. This is a huge reason why the right gets away saying things that climate change is an communist hoax. Because from their perspective lefties want to make a crisis in order to control peoples' behaviors. it's also why they fought covid restrictions so hard. They saw it as a government attempt to control peoples' behavior through economics. As a lot of people see it when you reduce economic freedom under "socialist" schemes, you reduce real freedom, because you need economic freedom to accomplish real freedom.

I dont necessarily disagree. But that's why my ideal approach to welfare is a UBI. I want to give people money, and then let them live their lives. Leftists lose the plot when they wanna push their weirdo commie sounding green ideas like having the government control every aspect of the economy and provide goods and services directly. I get it in the case of a market failure. It's been shown governments being involved in things like healthcare and education are good things. But EVERYTHING?! No, I don't like that at all. 

For as much as people romanticize UBS, there's so much that can go wrong there. IMplementation is key and the more complex the implementation there is, the more that can go wrong. I like simple solutions where the outcome can be controlled. Give people cash and let them live their lives. Based. Give people in kind services of questionable quality and use that access to control every aspect of their lives, not based. 

There's a reason I have the ideas I do. We need a UBI to give people freedom. But then we have to actually give them the freedom to do what they want. Including, if they want, work. My long term hopes is that over time more people will prefer leisure to work and that we can move away from work, but in the immediate to short term? Giving people the CHOICE is good enough to me. It's the lazies vs crazies debate Van Parijs likes to push. You got the lazies who dont wanna work and the crazies who do. Ideally you make a society where people get what they want. And UBI accomplishes that goal. If people want to work for more money, or just because they wanna, they can. If they wanna stay home and do nothing, they can (as long as society remains productive enough to sustain that at least). I want people to have what they want.

I do think that overall, a post work economy is going to be necessary long term to be sustainable climate wise, but we need to get people to voluntarily agree to it. If we try to impose eco-communism on people with UBS and paternalism, you're just gonna create riots that make what we saw during COVID child's play. And the left will be radioactive for 40 years after that. No one will wanna touch them and anything they do will be called "communism." Just like after the Carter administration. We're STILL dealing with the fallout of the left falling apart in the 1960s and 1970s.

No. We need to do this the UBI way. We can't give LITERAL socialists the time of day here. Their ideas don't work well, they'll be deeply unpopular with the american people, it's better to accomplish goals while being for freedom the whole time. My ideas expand freedom. I want to accomplish goals while giving people a choice. I don't want to impose a single way of life on people whether they want it or not.

Trying to make a positive case for biden in 2024

 So, the Biden bros are at it again. Seriously. They literally go into progressive spaces literally to start fights with people. It's obnoxious. Screw off, guys, screw off. Again, you guys don't seem to realize how alienating you are to your cause. If you want progressives to support Biden in 2024, then you need to make a positive case for him first. Which is what I'm going to try to do here. 

In this article, I'm mostly arguing for the general. Primary, do what you want, if you want to support Williamson, vote Williamson. I'm probably voting Williamson. I believe in democracy. I don't believe in suppressing the debate around Biden or portraying him as inevitable. We can and should push for better.

HOWEVER, let's be realistic, Biden is an incumbent, he has the party behind him, its infrastructure behind him, and he's going to win. I'm not going to tell you to vote blue no matter who, although we are, arguably, dealing with two madmen as the most likely nominees on the republican ticket, and I do think they're too scary to be allowed anywhere near power.

But still, I hate telling people to vote for something to avoid something else, even if it is arguably the most reasonable decision in my estimation this time. I want to actually advocate for biden as a progressive. 

As you guys know, my priorities are in this order: universal basic income, medicare for all, free college/student debt forgiveness, climate change, and then housing. Those are my top 5, and what a "new new deal" should look like. While Biden's presidency has fallen far short of these goals, he has at least attempted to make progress on some of them. 

On universal basic income, he was for the child tax credit expansion, which cut child poverty nearly in half and basically practically acts as a large scale basic income pilot. Andrew Yang and Scott Santens have both expressed interest in reviving this policy after dems in congress killed it. Biden would likely be amenable do it.

I admit, this isn't a full UBI. Not even close. But $300 a month per child is a nice way to get the ball rolling, and we should advocate for advancing this cause and expanding on it. I know I'm arguing more from my Yang-esque human centered capitalist perspective than what a leftie would want, but this IS my perspective, so yeah. Given UBI is my #1 priority, any progress in that direction should be considered in my opinion. And if anything, this is one of the best things Biden has done and it's a shame congress killed it. 

Second, climate change. He supported Build Back Better, which if you recall, when I analyzed it in detail reminded me of a lite version of Bernie's green new deal. And I actually liked it better than a full green new deal plan. After all, the purpose of climate legislation is to save the climate, and the socialist left wants to use it as an opportunity to push JOBS JOBS JOBS. And you know how I feel about jobs for their own sake. So yeah, Biden's original BBB plan gets my endorsement. I know that I was very critical of it early on, but I was largely speaking out of ignorance and after educating myself on climate policies, yeah, Biden's plan is good enough for me.

Why didn't he get it passed? Once again, congress. 

And then you have his student debt forgiveness plan. And yes, I've analyzed this one too. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing, and the reason it got shot down was the courts. 

Then you have the fact that the dude probably would've passed a $15 minimum wage...if not for congress. Maybe a public option for healthcare. To be fair on healthcare Biden hasn't said one iota since getting in and he deserves all the criticism he can get for that one. Free college, I mean he was for free community college. You have congress to thank for that one again.

I mean....if you're a progressive, you're probably underwhelmed. I admit, it's not everything I want either. It really isn't. His plans are half measures, some less than half of the way to where we wanna go, and BBB is the only plan I outright would say "yes, this is exactly what i want or close to it." And I know that won't fly for most progressives as most are green new dealers. 

But let's be honest, Biden wanted to go a lot further than he did, and accomplish a lot more than he did, but he was railroaded by congress and the courts. If you have a problem with nothing getting done, you should be pushing to get more progressives and democrats in congress. And not Joe Manchins and Krysten Sinemas either. if you are in one of their states, feel free to vote them out. They are a joke and deserve to be voted out. I'm not gonna defend them as I'm not all that interested in defending the dems as a "team." I'm interested in accomplishing goals, with the team being a means to an end. But right now, Biden wants to at least make some decent progress on the issues, and he's being railroaded. We need to strengthen our foothold in congress if we want to actually see his ideas pass. 

So my suggestion? If Biden is the inevitable nominee, get out and support him. Get out and support people running for congress. This isn't to say Biden will accomplish everything we want. He is horrifically centrist. I've thrown a fair amount of shade at him. But...Biden does support some progress on my top priorities, and IF he's the nominee in 2024, and he probably will be, I'm likely to endorse him. In part because of the above, and in part because the GOP is literally looking like this to me right about now. 

This is NOT, by the way, of endorsement of Biden in the PRIMARY. I support Williamson at the moment. Wanna make that perfectly clear. BUT....yeah, I'm probably not inclined to vote third party this time unless the dems seriously piss me off. Which they seem to be working on doing for some reason. Seriously guys, STOP. You need progressives to win, try to win them over with PROGRESSIVE POLICY. I just made my case for Biden above. Might not be the best case ever, but it's...what I can do.

In a move that surprises no one, Biden declared his 2024 run

 And also in a move that surprises no one, his campaign is milquetoast and mediocre. I like the framing somewhat, he argued either we'll have more freedom or less, implying that the GOP wants to take away freedom. And I kind of agree. Democrats stand for civil liberties and the GOP does not.

But let's be honest...don't we all wish we were...past this now? The GOP has gotten increasingly insane, and every election is just a vote for a lesser evil. We're not voting for something, we're voting against something. And admittedly, even I feel the need to vote against the GOP with how bad they've been. 

But don't think for a moment I like the democrats. my stance on them has not really changed much since 2016. As I've pointed out, only reasons I'm supporting Biden's inevitable presidency is because I don't want the country to fall to fascism. That and I honestly ain't overly excited about any alternative. Seriously. Williamson is no Bernie to me. And honestly, what I really would want is a Yang 2024 run we're just...not gonna get. 

Bleh. 

Politics is disappointing these days.

Even worse, the dems really aren't making it easy to support them. They're up to their same usual tricks in harassing progressives to support them and being overbearing jerks about it. Like, seriously, do you guys not understand that when you act like this, I LITERALLY DON'T WANT TO SUPPORT YOU?! Seriously, you guys are such bad advocates you make me WANNA protest vote when I otherwise wouldn't have.

Same goes with 2016. I went back and read some of my old stuff and it really sank in for me that yeah, if the dems didn't try to strong arm progressives into supporting them...that I probably would have supported them. I didn't like clinton but she was competent. What really set me off was her opposing my vision, and then telling me F U you have to support me anyway. Dems havent really learned with Biden. And that's scary.

Seriously, I'm to the point I take zero responsibility for if Biden loses this time. If you guys alienate the left again, that's your own darned fault. I keep warning you guys, hey, lay off the harassment of progressives, and I still get the same centrist dem jerks online bullying and harassing progressives online.

Seriously, the more you try to own us and relitigate the battles of 2000 and 2016 again, the more likely you are to have to refight those battles. I mean, when your candidate has an uninspiring vision, and that's all you really give us, then yeah, when we go to the polls we're just gonna have a bad taste in our mouths voting democrat. 

Take my advice or don't take it. Just don't complain to me when you end up alienating people. 

I really wish the dems would actually be FOR stuff. Yes, being pro libertarianism on social issues is a nice start. But honestly, we need UBI, we need universal healthcare, free college, climate change action.

Even Biden's original vision is looking not terrible right now. ive warmed up to build back better. The child tax credit expansion was practically a large scale UBI pilot. Public option healthcare with automatic opt in would be nice.

It's not that in all of these cases that this should be as good as it gets, clearly many of these are half measures, but Biden doesn't even support those overtly any more. 

Honestly, his whole candidate exposes the folly of centrism. We wanted the full policies, we got told to settle for half policies, and then he cant even accomplish those. The talk of "pragmatism" was always about watering crap down and now we barely got nothing. And all Biden has for 2024 is not being crappy on social issues. 

Really, it's just a race to the bottom. 

Again, the only thing keeping me supporting the guy in the general is the fact that we're gonna slide into fascism if we don't. I'll support williamson or whomever is the best my way in the primary, but honestly, the dems are quite hostile to the idea of there being competition in the primary and their message is turning me off.

Bleh, this whole election cycle is just leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Reacting to Robert Greenstein's "Commentary: Universal basic income may sound attractive, but if it occurred, would likelier increase poverty than reduce it"

 Long story short, it's a hack article written by some centrist welfarist talking about "political realities" and we need to compromise and blah blah blah UBI bad because targetted programs that help the deserving poor are better.

This was posted on r/basicincome and I responded to it as thus:

There are over 300 million Americans today. Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years.

Yes yes yes, we know it's fricking expensive, anyone wants my ideas on how to pay for it can go to my article on the subject from my blog.

https://outofplatoscave2012.blogspot.com/2023/01/funding-universal-basic-income-in-2023.html

Some UBI proponents respond that policymakers could make the UBI payments taxable. But the savings from doing so would be relatively modest, because the vast bulk of Americans either owe no federal income tax or are in the 10% or 15% tax brackets. For example, if you gave all 328 million Americans a $10,000 UBI and the cost was $3.28 trillion a year (about $33 trillion over ten years) before taxes, then making the UBI payments taxable would reduce that cost only to something like $2.5 trillion or $2.75 trillion (or $25 trillion to $27.5 trillion over ten years).

Making UBI benefits taxable kinda defeats the purpose of UBI. I could see eliminating the standard deduction maybe if you wanted to, but other than that...

We’ll already need substantial new revenues in the coming decades to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and avoid large benefit cuts in them.

you mean just removing the payroll tax cap that artificially kneecaps how much revenue we take in, creating this whole crisis to begin with, right?

We’ll need further tax increases to help repair a crumbling infrastructure that will otherwise impede economic growth.

Sure, but unless you plan on spending trillions a year in infrastructure, I'm not seeing how we can't do it.

And if we want to create more opportunity and reduce racial and other barriers and inequities, we’ll also need to raise new revenues to invest more in areas like pre-school education, child care, college affordability, and revitalizing segregated inner-city communities.

And here we go with the means tested crap.

look, the big difference between me and this guy is ideology. I'm a yang styled human centered capitalist with more of an anti work bend, and this dude is a mainstream liberal who would rather direct money into social programs on top of social programs.

A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs.

Yeah if you're a mainstream lib simping for the status quo.

UBI’s daunting financing challenges raise fundamental questions about its political feasibility, both now and in coming decades. Proponents often speak of an emerging left-right coalition to support it. But consider what UBI’s supporters on the right advocate. They generally propose UBI as a replacement for the current “welfare state.” That is, they would finance UBI by eliminating all or most programs for people with low or modest incomes.

I lean "left" on UBI all things considered, but UBI replacing parts of the existing safety net isn't a bad thing. You can see the above article on funding to see my proposals of what programs to cut, and which ones to keep.

Consider what that would mean. If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them.

If that's your only way to fund UBI, sure, but remember those big tax increases we could and should be doing with it?

Btw, I did some appendices to my UBI article discussing how my proposal would affect various groups of people, you can read it here. And yes, I did address the welfare stuff in it.

https://outofplatoscave2012.blogspot.com/2023/01/how-my-ubi-plan-affects-real-people.html

Yet that’s the platform on which the (limited) support for UBI on the right largely rests. It entails abolishing programs from SNAP (food stamps) — which largely eliminated the severe child malnutrition found in parts of the Southern “black belt” and Appalachia in the late 1960s

You mean the program, which as cited in the above article, only gives people a maximum benefit of $281 a month and comes with work requirements and time limits?

Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

Basically a knock off of a knock off of UBI? After all EITC is based on the NIT, which is a sister policy to UBI. It offers $560 a month to an adult, $3733 if you have one child, $6164 for 2 children, and $6935 for three.

Meanwhile my UBI is $15k a year with an additional $5400 a month per child.

Section 8 rental vouchers

Which i wouldnt even cut.

Medicaid

Which I wouldnt even cut and would argue for expanding into medicare for all or a public option program.

These programs lift tens of millions of people, including millions of children, out of poverty each year and make tens of millions more less poor.

Wanna know what also makes people less poor? A FREAKING UBI. And it does it without the paternalism and means testing.

Would we also end Pell Grants that help low-income students afford college?

We could fund free college for something like $60 billion a year last i checked, so i dont see the point in cutting such a program.

Would we terminate support for children in foster care, for mental health services, and for job training?

I really have to ask, is this person interested in a serious answer or are they just interested in moral grandstanding like most liberals seem to be when they talk crap about UBI?

d Dolan, who favors UBI, has calculated that we could finance it by using the proceeds from eliminating all means-tested programs outside health care — including Pell Grants, job training, Head Start, free school lunches, and the like, as well as refundable tax credits, SNAP, SSI, low-income housing programs, etc. The result, Dolan found, would be an annual UBI of $1,582 per person, well below the level of support most low-income families (especially working-poor families with children) now receive. The increase in poverty and hardship would be very large.

Yeah, keep arguing against that strawman, why don't ya?

To further understand the risks, consider how working-age adults who aren’t working would fare. In our political culture, there are formidable political obstacles to providing cash to working-age people who aren’t employed, and it’s unlikely that UBI could surmount them. The nation’s social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance — all go only to people with significant work records. It’s highly unlikely that policymakers would agree to make UBI cash payments of several thousand dollars to people who aren’t elderly or disabled and aren’t working. (By contrast, there is political support for providing poor families that have no earnings with non-cash assistance such as SNAP, Medicaid, rental vouchers, Head Start, and the WIC nutrition program.)

And here we go, this person is only interested in helping the "deserving poor" who "did everything right." They aren't interested in helping all of the poor or giving people freedom.

While cash aid for poor people who aren’t working has fared poorly politically, means-tested programs as a whole have done well. Recent decades have witnessed large expansions of SNAP, Medicaid, the EITC, and other programs.

heres a hint, i dont CARE about the "political feasibility" arguments. Im not trying to make nice with jobists and conservatives. All this dude is closing the overton window flat in our faces.

If anything, means-tested programs have fared somewhat better than universal programs in the last several decades.

And they suck, and it's everything wrong with the existing system.

Since 1980, policymakers in Washington and in a number of states have cut unemployment insurance, contributing to a substantial decline in the share of jobless Americans — now below 30 percent — who receive unemployment benefits. In addition, the 1983 Social Security deal raised the program’s retirement age from 65 to 67, ultimately generating a 14 percent benefit cut for all beneficiaries, regardless of the age at which someone begins drawing benefits. Meanwhile, means-tested benefits overall have substantially expanded despite periodic attacks from the right. The most recent expansion occurred in December of 2015 when policymakers made permanent significant expansions of the EITC and the low-income part of the Child Tax Credit that were due to expire after 2017.

Yeah, because republicans and centrist dems who sing their tune have been in charge. But that whole political era is why i have differing views. This dude is just a standard centrist lib pushing centrist lib arguments about political feasibility. I dont care about political feasibility. I care about changing the debate to make my ideas feasible.

In recent decades, conservatives generally have been more willing to accept expansions of means-tested programs than universal ones, largely due to the substantially lower costs they carry (which means they put less pressure on total government spending and taxes).

And if my life has taught me anything, it's that we shouldnt take our advice from the freaking GOP.

The record of recent decades thus points to an alternative course — pushing for steady incremental gains through available mechanisms, including means-tested programs, to provide as much of a floor as possible for Americans of lesser means.

This person totally supported Hillary in 2016. I can tell. "incremental gains", YOUR INCREMENTAL GAINS ARE ####!

i understand this is an older article, but yeah, whoever wrote it clearly likes the centrist version of the democratic party, and they're just pontificating their garbage.

While some UBI proponents argue that continued pressure on the middle class will make UBI politically feasible, I’m skeptical. Economic pressure on the middle class will not alter UBI’s daunting financing challenges. In fact, more such pressure will likelier increase middle-class resistance to the massive tax increases required to secure UBI without increasing poverty.

...which is why we structure it so 70-80% of people benefit. So we reduce the amount of resistance there is.

And we shouldn’t think that we can just get the resources solely or primarily by hitting people at the top. Will we really tax the top 1 percent or top several percent enough to finance most or all of UBI — on top of the higher taxes we’ll want the same group to pay to shoulder a substantial share of the burden of restoring Social Security solvency, repairing the infrastructure, and meeting other critical needs? Increased pressure on the middle class is more likely to put UBI farther out of reach, unless it’s financed heavily — as UBI supporters on the right favor — by shifting income and resources away from the poor.

Those other programs CAN likely be done with taxes on the rich. Look at what biden wanted to do without raising a penny in taxes below $400k.

But yeah we need higher broad based taxes, something that's more "scandinavian" in nature, and this will require a cultural shift. But I'm here to try to push that shift along, not be like "It CaNt Be DoNe".

To be sure, there is a possible exception: a carbon tax that returns its proceeds to the public via a universal payment. For a carbon tax to have any chance of enactment in the not-too-distant future, however, it almost certainly will have to allocate a substantial part of its proceeds to uses that are necessary to get the votes to enact it in the first place, such as relief for coal-producing states or regions. There’s also a powerful case for using some of the proceeds to greatly expand and accelerate research into alternative energy technologies; a carbon tax likely won’t be sufficient by itself to arrest global warming.

Blah blah blah more arbitrary political conditions.

Btw, my plan above has a carbon tax in it.

I greatly admire the commitment of UBI supporters who see it as a way to end poverty in America. But for UBI to do that, it would have to: (1) be large enough to raise people to the poverty line without ending Medicaid, child care assistance, assistance in meeting high rental costs, and the like (otherwise, out-of-pocket health, child care, and housing costs would push many people back into poverty); and (2) include among its recipients people who aren’t currently working (and lack much of an earnings record), something no U.S. universal program does. It also would have to be financed mainly by raising taxes layered on top of the large tax increases we’ll already need — and will probably have to fight tough political battles to achieve — to avert large benefit cuts in Social Security and Medicare and meet other needs.

It's almost like this guy set this battle up to be unwinnable by design. Most libs do that. More interested in defending their very flawed past victories than actually doing anything right.

This person is a standard hillary/biden supporting craplib through and through, and it shows.

The chances that all this will come to pass — whether now or 10 to 20 years from now, a time when the baby-boomers will nearly all be retired and Social Security and Medicare costs will be much higher, placing greater pressure on the rest of the budget and on taxes — are extremely low. Were we starting from scratch — and were our political culture more like Western Europe’s — UBI might be a real possibility. But that’s not the world we live in.

Again, RAISE THE SOCIAL SECURITY CAP. JESUS!

But yeah, this article is garbage. It's written by a centrist lib obsessed with "political realities" and is intended to set up UBI in a way to fail. Fight a strawman and win. Congrats. slow clap. You beat your strawman.

but yes, we know UBI costs lots and lots of money, and there are ways to pay for it. You might like some better or worse than others. but I have a plan, Yang has a plan, Scott has a plan, we all have plans. It's just a matter of "will we implement them or will we sit around with our thumb up you know where saying "It CaNt Be DoNe!!11!" This is the very archetype of the kind of person who will do the latter.

I just figured this blog would enjoy this political rant of mine. 

Discussing Andrew Yang's interview with Scott Santens

 So, Yang had Scott back on his program. I know last time they were on together, they talked about good old times and how Scott got Yang into UBI. And they discussed it again. So, since it's been a question on here for a while, yeah, yang is still pro UBI and pro cash relief, and they talked about it for the whole hour more or less. 

And yeah, they went into how Yang got most of his ideas from Scott, which makes sense. Again, that's why we tend to be such in agreement, because I got many of my ideas from Scott on reddit. And Scott arguably got some ideas from me too. Heck, it's possible that human centered capitalism as a concept originated from me somewhat, as me and scott were bouncing these ideas off of each other back in the day. And he probably read my reddit posts. And I read his stuff. And yeah. 

But yeah. Scott, Yang, and I, we all have similar ideologies. I admit I've gone a bit more in a more explicitly anti work direction, but that isn't uncommon either. Karl Widerquist posted on reddit too back in the day, and is currently plugging his current articles pushing for a "voluntary participation economy" even now. And obviously people like him and Phillipe Van parijs all influenced me.

So really, my ideas are really just a culmination of the UBI movement in general, and I've been heavily influenced by all of these guys, and may or may not have influenced them too. Not saying I did necessarily create "human centered capitalism" btw, but I did potentially help plant the seeds for it as a concept. Influenced the collective consciousness, yada yada. 

Anyway, the video was good. They talked about how you can't blame inflation on UBI because most of the money wasnt spent in the form of stimulus checks even. Good arguments. Of the $5 trillion given why didn't we see each person get $16000? Good question. I've actually argued the aid should've been given that way, although in retrospect Im glad we DIDNT go for a full UBI trial as everyone would be blaming inflation on that even though it wasn't the cause. They also talked about AI changing the economy and how we could frame UBI as an "AI dividend", not a bad idea actually. Always looking for new justifications to convince the normies that this is a good idea. Dealing with their moralities around work is tiresome. 

 They also talked about how Scott moved to DC and is fronting Yang's "Humanity forward" organization to try to expand cash relief and reintroduce the child tax credit expansion. While I'd like a larger and more universal income than that, it is proof of concept that UBI can work.

I love how critics of UBI love to point out the success of the CTC while simultaneously arguing against full on UBI btw. I was thinking of writing an article about some article some centrist dude did opposing UBI and he did that, but I don't think I will as I already ripped him on reddit enough. Maybe I'll copy and paste into another article. 

But yeah. Good interview, glad to see Yang talking about UBI again. Glad to see he's still for it at the end of the day. I really had to wonder sometimes. Like, did he abandon it? No, he just cant talk about it it seems.

Explaining the right wing perspective on transgenderism to lefties

 So, I recently came across a thread where lefties were asking other lefties why the right was obsessed with trans issues and what their solutions to those issues are. The replies were a mix bag with some people describing their views semi accurately, while others going cringe and calling them fascists and nazis. 

Being an ex conservative, I feel like I might be in a position to explain their issue. 

So, as we know, I used to have a biblical perspective on issues of alternative sexualities, ie, anything that isn't vanilla heterosexuality. In such a worldview, gender dysphoria is not a matter of mental illness or certain lines being crossed in a person's biology causing them to reject their born gender and pursue changing it. It's a matter of sin. 

I mean, keep in mind how repressed christians are with sexuality. Many of them are so repressed they don't know what a healthy sexuality looks like. This is because the Bible is quite unhealthy with how IT approaches sexuality. It treats the "lusts of the flesh" as sinful and encourages people to repress whatever thoughts they have. I mean, anything not strictly heterosexual is sinful in Christianity, and even a lot of stuff that is heterosexual is sinful if it doesn't take place within marriage.

That said, Christians often see alternative sexualities as perversions that will spread if tolerated in society. Conservatives Christians believe in repressing sinful sexuality because if we were open with sexuality, it's a huge slippery slope. As Christians would say back in the day, if we allow hetereosexuality, what next? Pedophilia? Bestiality? Yes yes, I recognize this is fallacious, and it ignores things like consent, but this is how these guys think. 

Transgenderism is just the next stage of the culture war for them. They lost homosexuality and they've moved onto the next front. And now they're trying to stop transgenderism from being normalized in society. They think if we tolerate such "sinful" behaviors, that they'll spread. Like, they think that if we normalize transgenderism it encourages people who would otherwise be cis to become transgender. Just like they believed that if we tolerated homosexuality, it would cause people who otherwise would be straight to be homosexual.

It doesn't work that way. Let's be honest. People are gonna be what they are, and the Christian worldview is horribly out of touch. I do not endorse these views, I'm just explaining it. 

Honestly, I would argue what they wanna do with trans people is what they wanted to do with homosexuals when I was growing up. You know, try to send them to reeducation camps to teach them Jeezus and stuff. It doesn't work. Because their perspective is out of touch with reality and just a matter of brainwashing. Let's face it, fundamentalist christianity is brainwashing, it's a rather cancerous worldview that causes people to see the world in a way that it is not, and causes people to pursue solutions to problems that they don't even understand, and that in a well grounded worldview, aren't even problems.

Again, I dont endorse this worldview, I want to make it clear. I actually have spent most of my time arguing against it since I left it. But that's how it is.

When these people talk about eradicating transgender ideology, they are talking about wanting to make that stuff beyond the pale in society again, to punish people who openly accept or embrace it. And given how Florida just made crossdressing a sex crime against children and sex crimes against children punishable by death, that's scary. They really wanna literally go back to the old days when we just stoned people who we didn't like. Like what the actual fudge.

I've been kinda leery in calling what the right wants to do a "genocide", since the SJW left tends to like to frame stuff from the perspective of "people i dont like are fascists and nazis", but I do have trouble arguing with the logic here. Even if we didn't call it that, it's regressive as fudge. Reminds me of crap the islamic countries in the middle east do. Religious fundamentalism truly is a regressive cancer on our society. 

And for anyone wondering why I'm so tolerant toward these buttholes, it's this. When I left CHristianity, I figured I didn't wanna be like them. I wanted to be better than them. I didn't wanna censor people for their views. Because that's the crap that they try to do to us for one, and for two, it gets their persecution complex going where they think we're being against them because we hate christianity and are agents of satan or whatever. 

Now, I do hate fundamentalist christianity, but I do believe in tolerating my political opponents no matter how crap their takes are. But let's be honest, the second they start trying to take away the rights of others in civil society, that's where they cross the line. And they are crossing the line. So yeah, we should fight these guys at the ballot box as hard as we can. They're nutcases, their ideas should not be implemented in civil society, and they should learn the freaking difference between having a personal morality based on religion, and imposing their views on everyone.

On a PERSONAL LEVEL it's fine to be christian. it's fine to have certain views that you keep to yourself and practice in your own personal life. It's NOT fine for you to impose them on others. As the older, less SJWey, secular lefties like to say, if you dont like abortion, don't have one. If you dont like homosexuality, dont bang other dudes. If you dont like transgenderism, dont get trans surgery. I mean, I recognize that yeah, sometimes the SJWs do get pushy with their stuff sometimes, but for the rest of us, yeah it literally is that simple. As I said, the modern "center" is actually left. It's the old left based on tolerance and live and let live. That's where I'm at. That's what I practice. 

I dislike pushy authoritarians who wanna force their way of life on others. The fundie christians are an extremely authoritarian and scary bunch who does wanna force their way of living on others. And the rest of society should tell them to screw off and take a hike. They can practice whatever they want in their personal lives as long as it's consentual and doesn't harm others. But when it does, well, that's when we fight.And we really should be trying to push back against these religious authoritarians.

Youtuber "The Humanist Report" Thinks his SJW Political Takes are SUPER Spicy

 So, I'm being cheeky with the title, but yeah, Matt Figuredo of "The Humanist Report" lately did a video in which he ripped into one the social justice takes of a centrist gaming youtuber that he follows. While he subbed to him for games, he got into doing political takes, and Mike kinda found that cringe.

Now, I'm going to be honest, I kinda feel the same way about Mike Figuredo in a way. I subbed to him around the time I got into a bunch of other leftie youtubers, and honestly, Mike kinda rubs me the wrong way too. He is, shall we say, a little to SJWey for me. And this video is a testament to that fact. 

As you guys can tell I'd rather watch Kyle Kulinski, who tends to shift a bit away from the SJW stuff and doesnt go in your face with it. The dude is still left, through and through, but his approach to dealing with these issues is more in line with my own, where he outright says the left needs to stop leaning into "wokeness" but then he will just relentlessly rip the right and their psycho authoritarian ways.

Whereas Mike plays the more traditional leftie game of being a bit more into the whole SJW religion thing. And him ripping on this centrist guy is kind of a testament to that. I mean, this dude's takes weren't anything special, I kinda sorta agreed with him on a lot.

But Mike thinks that being "centrist" on cultural issues is being tantamount to agreeing with the right. he pulls the whole enlightened centrist schtick of "well this side wants to genocide no people, and this side wants to genocide all of the people, and I don't know both make good arguments."

Uh, no. That's not how this works, AT ALL. And I know this because Im an outright cultural centrist.

Here's the thing. In a modern context, being culturally centrist and being a fence sitter is the equivalent of being LEFT by default. Because most "centrists" in this context tend to hate the culture warriors on both sides and just wanna be left alone. This dude probably isnt anti gay or anti trans at all, he just seems to have a problem with shoving it in peoples' faces and virtue signalling about it. 

I mean, I actually surfed patriots.win around the time of Trump being arrested because i wanted to see the salt of those guys freaking out over that, but most were just obsessed with anti trans stuff. But some of the memes were stuff like "hi, I'm trans", and the other guy being like "I didn't ask." 

I think the big issue the left has where it gets itself into trouble is it has to push the boundaries. It's not enough to do your think and I do mine, they HAVE to announce their weird sexualities to the world, and you HAVE to accommodate them while doing it, or you're a bigot. And that's where the left tends to lose people. Because it isn't enough to just be pro "do whatever you want", if you don't actively wanna participate in their circlejerk and virtue signal the same things that you do, you're a bigot in their eyes. 

And that's what this guy was getting at with his criticizing Hershey over the trans stuff, and I think that's also why people criticized Bud Light over rainbow cans. Your sexuality is like your...you know...or alternatively like your religion. It's fine that you have one, it's fine that you enjoy it in the company of consenting partners, but people have a problem when this stuff gets shoved down everyone else's throats. 

To some extent, the modern SJW left tends to be that bike meme where they stick a stick in the spokes while riding, fall over, and then blame bigots for their predicament. No, to some extent, you guys did that to yourself. 

All "centrists" are telling you guys to do is to chill a bit with the self sabotaging behavior and obnoxious self righteous evangelism.

Like imagine if these guys went around being like "murder is bad right? muirder is bad, you must admit 50 times a day that murder is bad, otherwise youre being a bad ally", and then someone said they're not doing it and then they said you're in league with the murderers.

That's....SJWism in a nutshell.

They take something that shouldnt be controversial, and add gasoline to the fire and make it more controversial, by virtue of being so obnoxious about it. And even worse they literally CREATE and generate their own opposition via Trevor's Axiom (you know, that thing from south park i reference from time to time), and we end up all fighting over stupid crap that shouldnt be controversial.

Yes yes, everyone knows the far right and bigots are bad. I despise their brand of religious authoritarianism. Supporting the right these days is like stanning Caesar's Legion in Fallout New Vegas. It's the psychotic option I can't see why people would actually do rationally.

But that doesn't mean I'm explicitly pro NCR either. I might be a mr house guy, or a yes man independent. But the left doesnt recognize that. They're like, if you're not openly pro NCR, you're part of the problem because you're making caesar's legion win. 

And yeah. That said, I just think Mike's take here is just...cringe. I mean, I notice on social justice takes he does get a bit cringe. Lefties get a little too tied up in their tribalism and they seem to think centrists are people who are literally 50% between them and the psychopaths on the other side.

No, the actual center in modern culture wars is probably 75% to the left, and most of them would probably be left, if the left rebranded itself away from this social justice nonsense, but because the left is so extreme and fundamentalist and has to shove this stuff in everyone's faces, they lose supporters.

It's funny. Back in the day, when gay marriage was a controversy, Lewis Black had this skit where he would talk about "gay bandidos". This was in reference to the idea of homosexuality "destroying the american family". And he was like "how, are they just gonna break into your home and start screwing each other in the butt on your kitchen table?" 

I mean, the point of this was to point out how "hey, these people just wanna live their lives, why are the right acting like they're a threat to american values? isnt that stupid?"

And it worked. Within the decade, we became pro gay marriage as a country and now it's legal. The right lost that war. And why did they lose that war? Because people realized it didnt matter. people turned against the religious authoritarians and realized there was no reason to keep it illegal other than religious nuts wanting to push their values on everyone. 

 But SJWs are LITERALLY the strawmen rush limbaugh warned us about. i dont think they realize how bad they come off. Like really.

It's simple, guys, if you want the left to win the culture war, stop being such virtue signalling twits and alienating people. Most people like the guy Mike is ripping on would probably be pro left if only the left pushed their perspective from the viewpoint of freedom rather than the viewpoint of this weird "cult of caring" as I like to call it. 

I don't get the appeal of Robert F Kennedy's presidential run

 So, in all fairness of discussing various democratic presidential candidates, I might as well include the third guy running, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He actually has 14% of the vote, vs Williamson's 5%. 

And I just don't get it. he's my third choice in the democratic primary by a long shot. Out of three. He's worse than Biden. And yes, he's part of THAT Kennedy family. I honestly dont know why the Kennedys are so popular, or ever were so popular. JFK is one of the worst post WWII presidents ever on the democratic side IMO. I mean, the dude gave niche speeches that caused the craplibs to go wild I guess, but when I think JFK, I think Cuban Missile Crisis, and cheating on his wife. I mean, that's what the dude is known for. I mean, really, what did the dude do? What should he be praised for? His VP, LBJ did FAR more in practice, and is at least worth praising. JFK though? Meh.

But yet, this is another political dynasty that just keeps coming back and not going away. Thankfully, this dynasty is older than the Clintons and Bushes, and less relevant in the modern era. This guy seems known for...conspiracy theories and anti vax propaganda. Fun! 

Anyway, going on his campaign website, what is he running on? Well, he only has 6 issues. Honest government, reconciliation (healing the divide), clean it up, revitalization, peace, and civil liberties.

Yes, this is as bland and tasteless as it looks. Looking more in detail, he wants to make government agencies more accountable to the American people. He has "clear positions" on social issues, without explaining what they are, and wants to not demonize people he doesn't agree with (so basically he sounds like forward). His "clean it up" priority is emphasizing environmentalism, which aint bad, but it seems kinda barebones, like everything else in his campaign. He talks about poverty, globalization, and healthcare, but just offers platitudes there too. His "peace" priority seems to be mostly "we need to stop spending money on foreign wars and spend it at home", ignoring that ukraine is kinda important right now. On civil liberties he mentioned curtailing big tech's power to censor people, being against COVID era measures to shut down the economy, and ending the war on drugs, so it's kind of a mixed bag. 

Honestly, I'm not impressed. His website is all vagueness. It's as if he's running not on issues, but platitudes. And he;'s running on his family name. Why does he have 14% of the vote? Williamson is far better than this, heck BIDEN is more progressive. Like people wonder why im as lenient on biden as I am, but Biden actually does have some progressive ideas. This guy is just basically like, if forward ran a candidate in the democratic party and it wasn't andrew yang. You know what I'm saying? like, we need MORE centrism and playing nice with others and all of this polarization is just too much. You know? He's running to Biden's right. His campaign is kind of a joke.

Like, if I'm gonna go for a non Biden option, I want an UPGRADE, ya know? Williamson is at least somewhat of an upgrade. Even she's kinda platitude-y compared to say, bernie, but she looks brilliant with her detailed plans vs this guy. Like as much as I criticized the leftist candidates for not having enough policy details, they're still exponentially more detailed than this guy is. I don't get the appeal. As of right now, Williamson > Biden > Kennedy.

Discussing conservatives who put more emphasis on anti wokeness than social security cuts

 So, we all know that I've had this stance for a while that the left needs to back off of identity politics and wokeness in order to push a more working class oriented political agenda. My own political ideology can be summed up as being pro working class, and libertarian on social issues. That's what I've been for for years, and I have no intention on changing that.

But today, we saw a poll out suggesting that many on the right will prioritize anti wokeness over pushing back against social security cuts. And this might lead to some suggesting that I would want to win those kinds of voters over. After all, any time I suggest the left drops wokeness, I get tons of fire back from them claiming that I wanna throw women, minorities, and trans people under the bus and they start going on about the nazbol vortex. For a while I said the nazbol vortex doesn't exist, but I do think that some segments of the bernie or bust left (and we know who I'm talking about) have gone in a weird direction like that. And I largely oppose them. Because they're nuts. 

So, I want to actually clarify my position on this. As I saw it in 2016, there were a lot of voters who could have swung left from the republicans based on working class economic issues. it wasn't a huge amount, but they were a form of swing voter. In a sense, my origins coming to the left are based somewhat on this phenomenon. I am an ex right winger, who realized trickle down is full of crap, and who wanted to shift left on economics. I also shifted left culturally, but through the "new atheist" community, NOT wokeness. The woke people, I originally thought were like, conservative strawmen, but in retrospect, no, weirdos like that exist. And they are very offputting and alienating. It's not their POLICY POSITIONS for me that are the problem, it's the framing and the hyper fixation on those issues. And I know in a lot of swing states like PA, there was a time post great recession where the left could have just  brought a ton of people over by pandering to working class issues. it's why obama won. But then in 2016 Hillary hyper emphasized woke cultural issues while ignoring class issues. And I would argue it cost her the election. Bernie would have won, but Hillary did not. Instead, some voters swung to Trump.

Now, I'm not saying these guys are all progressives. A lot of them aren't. But ultimately, a lot of Americans are self interested, and I think the great recession shifted them left where in 2016 we had an environment where they could've continued voting left if the dems stood for policies that helped them. The social policies wouldn't have mattered. The reason they did was because in 2016 Trump was anti PC and people loved it, and Hillary was TOO PC for her own good. And in the lack of the dems standing for anything, people voting for the anti PC candidate who at least promised to bring jobs back. 

But, I do acknowledge that 2016 was potentially a realigning year, and since then, America has gone the wrong way. We've been focused on the wrong issues, and coalitions have already aligned. And if anything, some bernie types have gone over to right, and have abandoned left wing concerns altogether. So it's actually the opposite of what we wanted. Rather than bringing over some alienated right wingers to our side, we lost alienated left wingers to the right. Again, you know who I'm talking about and if you don't, it rhymes with Dimmy Jore and BayoftheWern. And the right wingers the dems ARE appealing to these days are these weirdo mitt romney and jogn kasich types who wants the dems to triangulate EVEN MORE to the center, claiming they're too extreme as they are. It's ridiculous. Our political coalitions are totally broken.

And while I dont like those centrist types AT ALL, I'm not really interested in bringing over the explicit anti woke people in the vein of donald trump and ron desantis. When I say I'm anti woke, it's that I want actual sane centrism on culture war stuff. I'm culturally left, but less in your face about it. I want people to be free do live as they want as long as they dont interfere with others. Anti woke rightoids are far right authoritarians. Full stop. They want to control peoples' lives and also how they think. They call for outright censorship of left wing ideas, and seem to be edging up to grossly mistreating the LGBT community. They're psychotic. They literally remind me of say, caesar's legion in fallout new vegas. Ya know, cray cray.

And if people care more about that kind of crazed censorship than about PROTECTING SOCIAL SECURITY, then we have lost those guys to the right, and they are no longer worth appealing to. I mean, the best I wanna offer to those guys is to deemphasize those issues and focus on ecnonomics more. But if they dont care about econ and just wanna wage a war on woke, screw them, let the "confederate" party have them. And before some right winger tells me hurr durr, dems were the party of confederates, yeah, google party realignments and the southern strategy. 

The fact is, while I'm okay with people coming over to my side FOR ECONOMICS even if they hold personal anti woke views, I'm not interested in actually compromising left wing positions to psycho authoritarians. I'm just not gonna demand insane purity and demand everyone who dares come over for economics not hold some personal views that may be questionable.

I guess for me the line is this, if you're willing to stow your crappy views on social issues to come over on our side and to vote on economics, fine. But if you demand i be anti woke in the same way as you are, I'm gonna tell you to take a hike, potentially while sending you offensive rammstein/lindemann concert performances that overtly express leftie opinions on said social issues. 

Again, my goal was always depolarization on cultural issues. Not "abandoning" them. I'm never gonna actually give up my convictions. I'm just going to shift a little bit to the center in terms of rhetoric as to NOT PISS PEOPLE OFF. The left has a habit of pissing people off and alienating them and driving them to the right. But if you're gonna be a far right authoritarian, Im more likely to support left wing positions unapologetically enough in my own way. Which STILL aint going to be enough for the leftist purity testers, but screw them too. I roll my way. 

I just wanted to clarify my position on these issues. I know the far left likes to accuse me of wanting to abandon left wing positions and go full on nazbol vortex, but nah, I just wanted to win over some people who care about their economic livelihoods over the culture war. But if they are gonna prioritize the culture war from the right and not care about economic positions, well, I have no interest in going out of my way and pandering to them.