So, as you guys know, economic issues are very near and dear to my heart. They are the core reason I remain so interested in politics, and much of what I've written about on here is about how we can solve poverty and solve the problems with capitalism without abolishing the entire system. By this point, I have a good idea of what I want, and I know roughly how I would accomplish it. I mean, I've made entire metrics to judge 2024 candidates in the past, and will likely release some detailed metric discussing each of the candidate's plans at some point before the primary actually begins.
Recently, I had someone posting about Willamson's anti poverty plan on a forum I regularly occupy, and I honestly have a lot of things to say about this, so I figured I will react to her actual policies on the issues. Some things I'll be saying will be good, some will be not so good, but ultimately, this is, so far, the best plan I've seen in this race, considering neither Yang, nor Sanders, are candidates this time. With that said, let's get into it.
I won't be going over the introduction, I'll mostly be focusing on policies themselves, but the introduction makes a good argument discussing how screwed people are in this country.
As for policies:
Declare an unconditional war on poverty, and aim to relieve and cure its symptoms in order to find solutions to prevent it.
So the johnson approach. Well, I suggest we pick up where Johnson left off. In 1969, president Nixon had a commission on poverty that looked at the issue in detail, and pushed for a basic income to solve it. You know, that policy your friend Andrew Yang ran on? The policy you stated having support for in 2020 but seemed to have dropped in 2024? Yeah, I think we should start there.
And yes, I'm going to be biased here. I do have an idea of what I want, after all.
Strengthen democracy by urging Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to enfranchise voters, stop voter suppression, enact automatic voter registration, protect election security, and reform immigration.
Not sure what exactly this has to do with poverty, but this is a nice idea.
Restore and make permanent the enhancement of Child Tax Credit and other critical investments that reduced poverty in the U.S. by the greatest amount in a single year in over 50 years.
Yes, because as it turns out, giving people cash solves poverty. Almost like we should have a basic income...
Lift poverty wages by raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025. Currently, 1.1 million hourly wage earners earn the federal minimum wage or less, and a full third of the workforce earns less than $15 an hour. These wage earners are disproportionately women.
I mean good idea. Although if she takes office in January 2025 it's gonna be implemented without a phase in period? Honestly, the amount should be a little higher at this point, and it's gonna take a few years. I'd aim for $18 an hour by the end of her first term.
Ensure Universal rent control and a prohibition on rental deposits.
*cringe* Rent control doesn't work...
We need a housing program. We need more housing. Rent control will just make it harder to get enough housing for people long term...
Fund social housing as part of the Green New Deal to build at least 15 million green, union-built, publicly-owned homes over the next 10 years.
Now this is more like it. And this is the kind of jobs program that i WOULD support. Because it's the kind of program that actually gets us the stuff we need and isn't just BS make work.
Provide grants to the poor, working poor, and our small businesses to retrofit their existing homes and businesses to become clean energy efficient.
I mean thats not really a poverty initiative as much as its a green initative, and i doubt most people who are poor are thinking about installing solar panels on their roof.
End homelessness and housing insecurity with a Homes Guarantee. A Housing First approach to ensuring stable housing has been proven to improve outcomes over mitigation-based approaches to homelessness.
I mean, with the extra homes you're building, sure.
Expand the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to aid the working families of this country with the burden of heating and cooling bills.
I mean this is nice, but you could just give people cash instead. One thing I hate about the safety net is it's always like, let's have these 50 programs that do different things, when we could have one program doing them all. I'm not saying we literally need only one program, but you get the idea. UBI being the main one, and the others being stuff like healthcare, education, housing, ya know, addressing market failures.
Strengthen the safety net by removing the obstacles to the cash welfare system, Temporary Assistance for Families (TANF). Reduce the hurdles that keep families from receiving necessary assistance, increase the income threshold at which people are eligible to receive cash assistance, eliminate harsh sanctions and time limits and hold states accountable for the funds reaching eligible families. (For every dollar currently budgeted for TANF, only 22 cents get directed to poor families).
Just fricking abolish TANF. it's a joke of a program. Give people a UBI.
Restore funding for SNAP programs in every state to ensure families have access to food stamps and nutritional needs.
We dont need more SNAP. We need more cash. UBI is the answer here.
Provide paid family and medical leave.
Cool.
Restore the current Community Service Block Grant (CSBG) back to its original form under the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), which sent federal funding directly into communities via their local Community Action Agencies to eliminate poverty, expand educational opportunities, increase the social safety net for the poor and unemployed, and tend to the health and financial needs of the elderly.
Or how about we just give people a fricking UBI?
Make Education Affordable: Public colleges (both community colleges and four-year colleges) and trade schools must be made tuition free. Those trade schools will coordinate with organized apprenticeship programs to give students real-world experience.
Awesome, hitting another priority here.
Forgive all federal and privately held student debt (including interest): Students are too often burdened with school loans that hold them back from following their dreams. Forgiving all student debt will allow students to work in a career they love, launch a business, or buy a home.
Based.
Now, there's more. She also has sections on banking and access to capital, as well as jobs and labor. I'm gonna list the things she wants to do for banking and access to capital, but I'm just gonna gloss over that part as I find it kinda boring and have no real opinion here.
A Williamson administration will:
- Cap interest rates at 10 percent across all financial institutions.
- Re-introduce the Glass-Steagall Act immediately to ensure commercial banking is separated from investment banking, and prosecute banking executives for breaking those rules.
- Encourage Congress to pass the Close the Shadow Banking Loophole Act (S. 5189), ensuring that Industrial Loan Companies (ILC) are subject to every rule that traditional banks adhere to.
- Encourage Congress to pass the Postal Banking Act (S.3891), providing basic banking services to all Americans through our more 31,000 USPS Post Offices.
- Encourage Congress to pass the Stop Overdraft Profiteering Act of 2021 (S.2677), ensuring that banks do not punish their consumers for having less in their accounts.
- Encourage Congress to pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act, ensuring consumers aren’t attacked by surprising or predatory fees.
- Encourage Congress to pass the Minority Business Resiliency Act of 2021 (H.R.2689).
- Utilize executive power and Congress to continue breaking down barriers in access to capital, specifically for black and brown families across the nation.
- Encourage Congress to pass the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act of 2021 (S.1368), making it easier to buy a home and build wealth through homeownership
I mean, I guess this is good. I dont have a super strong opinion on any of this, but I like some of it. I know postal banking has been floated as a concept for a while. I like the idea of stopping overdraft fees from happening, and stuff like that, but yeah. Banking stuff is a little outside of my expertise. I like at least some of these though.
I will focus more on the jobs and labor section though.
Pass trade deals that include worker protection provisions that prevent further deindustrialization of our communities.
Yeah like here's the thing about free trade. I'm not anti free trade, but I agree something must be done to avoid doing business with exploitative countries, since free trade with no regulations is just a race to the bottom for most people. I honestly think we should be establishing labor standards, tax rates, and stuff like that in any trade agreement we have, so that we all avoid undercutting each other in our desire to trade. otherwise there will be global market pressure to reduce taxes and labor regulations to draw jobs to one's specific country. It's a race to the bottom that no one wins, except the rich capitalists who can play countries against each other to get what they want.
Pass the PRO Act (H.R. 842), make it easier to unionize, unionized workers enjoy better wages and protections.
All for reducing barriers to unionization.
Hold Corporate Executives accountable for labor law violations. CEOs should be personally liable for unpaid wages, and criminally liable for interference with workers’ efforts to organize. Employers who engage in wage theft, misclassifying workers, and bad faith stalling during bargaining, aka “surface bargaining”, will be heavily penalized.
Yeah if r/antiwork and the like have taught me anything its that wage theft and crap is disgustingly common and that this is the real war on crime that we need to be fighting. So I agree with having stiff penalties with violating labor laws.
Ensure that our undocumented workers are protected by labor laws. More than a third of our undocumented immigrants are paid below minimum wage, and close to 85 percent do not get paid overtime.
Even though I'm not big on illegals being in this country, I actually kinda agree with this. Because the reason businesses get away with exploiting labor laws so much with illegals is they won't do anything to report being abused since it gets them deported. If we could hold businesses accountable and hold them to the same standards as they would if they used citizens for labor, it would remove the economic incentive to hire illegals in the first place.
Urge Congress to pass a meaningful Reparations bill, addressing the moral and economic debt we owe to descendants of enslaved and oppressed generations of black Americans. See details here.
Ugh, can we not? Sorry, I dont like the idea of reparations specifically for black people. For me, if you want reparations for an unjust economic system, it should be paid to everyone through a UBI.
Enact fair taxes on the wealthy, corporations, and Wall Street, and reduce taxes on working people. The richest people in America increased their wealth by $6.5 trillion in 2021. The total wealth of the 1% reached a record $45.9 trillion by the end of 2021, and these fortunes increased by more than $12 trillion, or more than a third, during the course of the pandemic. We should repeal the 2017 Trump tax breaks for the wealthy where 83 cents on every $1 cut went to the top 1%, immediately restoring the middle class tax cuts included in that bill; restore the estate tax to fortunes over $5 million’ add a tiny tax on Wall Street trade; and put a 2% tax on wealth over $50 million, and additional one percent on wealth over $1 billion.
Yeah, this here is very bernie-esque, and I like it.
Lift completely the social security cap.
I mean that would fix the funding issues with social security...
Establish a universal single payer healthcare system, in which everyone is covered for all medical services, including mental health.
Based!
Reduce the cost of prescription drugs by repealing the law that blocks the government from negotiating lower prices. If pharmaceutical companies don’t lower prices, activate the “march-in rights” under the Bayh-Dole Act that allows the government to license a patent to another party who charges less for medicine, or the government will simply produce those medicines itself, since much of the initial biomedical research and development done on pharmaceuticals is through publicly funded universities and the National Institute of Health.
Also based.
Invest in clean energy and clean water, which will create green jobs, address climate change, and address the needs of the poor and people of color who already feel the effects of climate change.
While we should do this, doing it specifically as a jobs program is cringe to me. I support a build back better style framework to climate change, not this green new deal crap. GND is the solution for jobists who wanna party like it's 1939 again. The whole appeal to these people is the idea of having massive public works employing millions of people. I just want to make the sausage while not focusing so much on employing people.
Provide universal affordable child care. Train apprentices to expand the quantity and upgrade the quality of competent care providers.
I mean it's a decent proposal.
Urge Congress to re-introduce the Free-Lunch-for-All Program, to ensure that every child has access to food, and the cancellation of lunch debt.
Or continue to charge parents for lunch but give people a UBI so they can afford it. I remember in elementary school the school lunch program was like 80 cents a week? With inflation since the 90s, that's what, $2? like, come on.
Aaaand, that's it.
So, lets talk about this in terms of my priorities. UBI? Nope. Medicare for all? Check. Free college/student debt forgiveness? Check. Housing program? Check. Climate change legislation? Check.
And as far as other proposals, higher minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, pro unionization efforts, child tax credit (aka UBI for kids), other welfare expansions.
Like if I were to grade this plan, it would get a B. You'd need a UBI to get an A, but this is basically a nice rehash of Bernie's ideas. I mean, it tends to lean a bit hard into "let's have extra funding for SNAP and TANF and block grants" and not enough into "we need a UBI", and a little too hard into the green new deal approach, but eh...that's the left for you. They're STUCK living in the shadow of FDR. In this case, it's kind of a shame. I really think Marianne knows better. She advocated for UBI in 2020, and I actually see her approach this time as a down grade. I think in designing her plans and how to frame her ideas, she really ended up listening to what i considered the wrong consultants. Kinda like how Bernie ended up listening to that stephanie kelton and her pro jobs program and anti UBI nonsense.
I mean, honestly, UBI should be the centerpiece of a 21st century anti poverty program. Sorry, but that's just how I feel. I think Yang's approach is fundamentally the correct one, and my core disagreement with the rest of the left is generally speaking over this. As discussed with my reaction to "economics in one lesson", the left is too obsessed with jobs and work, and that is the sole source of agreement that I ultimately have with Hazlitt there ideologically. The left is too focused on preserving work, and making work pay, and trying to keep people employed. I understand this is necessary in a society in which we all have to work to get the money to survive, but rather than focus so much on jobs, I'd rather give people the money and the freedom associated with that to choose their own path in life. Any government jobs created should be for a purpose. And she had valid purposes there. Build homes, for example. We need to build tons of houses to alleviate the housing shortage we're currently facing. We literally need to build our way out of that crisis. That's the only real answer other than addressing the ownership issues and LVT on landlords and UBI and blah blah blah. But other than stuff like that, it's like, why do we valorize work and employment so much? I dont want some crappy guaranteed job busting my butt on some infrastructure project. Screw that.
Other than this core difference though, Williamson's program is pretty solid. For a non UBI centric idea, this is about the best we can do. I mean, maybe add bernie sanders' codetermination stuff to give it a market socialist bend, but other than that, yeah, this is about it. Stronger welfare programs with fewer restrictions, higher minimum wage, more support for unions. Medicare for all, free college, housing, climate change programs, etc. Again, it's a solid program. I'd give it an 8/10 or a B. It's not perfect, it's a good rehash of Bernie's platform, but it's much stronger than Biden's anti poverty plan. Which is closer to a 6/10 and like a C. So yeah, she beats the relatively low bar of being better than Biden. And that's why I support her. I really wish we did have a UBI centric candidate like Yang though. They'd get my vote in a heartbeat given the rest of their platform wasn't garbage.
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