Part of the problem in society is that we value money too much. what Yang is proposing is not giving everyone a $1000 a month, but that we don’t value money so much. At the root of every problem from the biggest corporations to the smallest criminal is greed and money. Everything today is about how much money....not much else is valued and it leads to corruption at every level. Knowledge, saving the planet, the future generations, and just general kindness and respect for each other is forgotten. We all share this moment together on this planet for a brief time and we can make that suck a little less for everyone by not attaching a dollar value to everything and determinging how we deal with each other based on that. I am sure it’s really lonely at the top. Imagine having so much money that you constantly have to worry about everyone you deal with because they’re always trying to get on your level. You cant trust anyone. That idea is less magnified until it reaches the bottom. That is the only thing that trickles down in trickle down economics.
Yang strikes me as that type of candidate that is very sound, has good ideas, will probably do well in the debates he's in...but will never get much momentum or name recognition, and will fade away. Too many front runners for him to catch. Thoughts?
That's a real fancy way of saying he won't win because he's Asian. Of course, you aren't wrong. I like that he's upfront in saying he's basically running to get UBI into the mainstream debates.
Well, there is this. I think that means he will get into the first primary debate? I think that's key - he need to have visibility to have a chance.
Over time it has worsened. Watching people be assholes in public over nothing/time/drugs/alcahol. These people are angry they cannot afford to keep up with.... I used to see more good and love being spread in society, but as more people grow up with less opportunity that is fading.
what's your fascination with 16 year olds? I've seen multiple posts referring people as such on this site.....
Yang getting some pretty good press these days: "Andrew Yang is Ross Perot for Millennials" https://theweek.com/articles/829377/andrew-yang-ross-perot-millennials
I recall many media outlets tried to make Obama a millenial thing. Bernie was clearly a distraction for millenials to get votes off Hillary. So far Yang has the: -Asian vote -Millenial vote -Progressive vote -Part of the anyone but Trump vote -People who want a thousand dollars a month vote -People who want a knowledgeable president who actually likes solving problems vote
The groups who have all the power will not just hand it back. They fought and worked for that power. They will say things like it will cause inflation or there is not enough money. They push this idea of scarcity. It is always about control. Throughout history Americans have fought for control. It is what makes us American. The knowledge and reality that there are more of us is how we prevailed. You do not gain power or freedom without fighting for it. Electing someone like Yang means there will be a fight every step of the way.
Just linking to original podcast with transcript. And snippets of it below. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/andrew-yang/ .... DUBNER: One easy argument against a U.B.I. is that if you give everyone a dividend like you’re proposing, $1,000 a month per person, all that new money in the economy will cause the kind of inflation that will render that $1,000 much less powerful. What’s your argument against that? YANG: Yeah, so I looked into the causes of inflation that are making Americans miserable right now, and they are not in consumer goods like media or clothing or electronics. DUBNER: Those are all still getting much cheaper. YANG: Yeah, and a lot of that is being made more efficient by technology and supply chains and everything else. The three things that are making Americans miserable in terms of inflation are housing, education, and health care. And each of those is being driven by something other than purchasing power. Housing is being driven by the fact in some markets people feel like they need to live in let’s say New York or Seattle or San Francisco to be able to access certain opportunities and then there’s not much flexibility in terms of their ability to commute like a long distance. Education, it’s because college has very sadly gotten two-and-a-half times more expensive even though it has not gotten two-and-a-half times better. And then the third is health care, which is dysfunctional because of a broken set of incentives and the fact that individuals aren’t really paying in a marketplace. So if you put $1,000 into the hands of Americans, it’s actually going to help them manage those expenses much better. But it’s not going to cause prices to skyrocket, because you can’t have every vendor colluding with every other vendor to raise prices. And there’s still going to be price sensitivity among every consumer and competition between firms. .... Evelyn FORGET: If you give people money for nothing, why won’t they just quit their jobs? The economist Evelyn Forget studied the effects of a small Canadian experiment that paid out a universal income. Her finding? FORGET: The finding was that primary earners really don’t reduce the number of hours they work very much when you offer a guaranteed annual income. YANG: A neuroscientist in Seattle said something to me that really stuck with me. He said, “The enemy of universal basic income is the human mind.” And what he meant by that is that people are programmed for resource scarcity. They think, “Hey, there is not enough to go around. If you get it, I don’t get it. And then if we all get it, it’s somehow going to harm us.” And that’s what we have to overcome. We have to overcome this knee-jerk sense of scarcity that is baked into, in many ways, the way we’re trained to perceive value in money. .... So digital social credits and a universal basic income, these are Andrew Yang’s two most prominent proposals in his Presidential campaign. There are, of course, many others, most of which align with a standard Democratic platform. You can see them all at Yang2020.com. I’d asked him his most outlandish position. YANG: We should have a psychologist in the White House that’s looking in on the mental health of the executive branch, because it doesn’t make any sense to me to have that much power and responsibility without some sort of mental-health professional monitoring. DUBNER: Did you have this idea before the current presidency? YANG: I always thought so. I mean, my brother’s a psychology professor. I think it would also help destigmatize mental-health issues and anxiety and depression around the country, and just say, “Look, we all have struggles.” That includes people at the top of the government. .... DUBNER: You happen to be the Democratic-entrepreneur-as-would-be-President who happens to be running after the successful campaign of a Republican-entrepreneur-as-President who a lot of people agree, his entrepreneurship and CEO-ship have not contributed to a stable presidency or to a business-like presidency, etc. Does that not strike you as potentially terrible timing? YANG: Well, the reason why Donald Trump in my mind won — aside from the fact that we’ve blasted away all these manufacturing jobs — is that many Americans are desperate for some kind of change agent. And if you look at it, there has been a thirst for that not just with Donald Trump but with Bernie Sanders’s outsized success, even to some extent with Barack Obama winning in ‘08, where the citizens of the United States have been casting about for some kind of change because they know that our government is failing us. Donald Trump is a terrible president because he’s a terrible president. He’s not necessarily a terrible president because he was not steeped in our government for decades. And genuine entrepreneurs like myself regard Donald Trump as a bullshit marketing charlatan. So he gives us all a bad name. And the goal is to show what real builders and entrepreneurs would do to solve some problems. ....
Well, I'm actually surprised that he's had as much staying power as he's had and that I still hear about him. Given that he's coming from the outside with no name recognition, and he's running a narrow issue campaign, I would have expected him to fade out already and he hasn't. So, no I don't expect him to win, I don't expect he expects to win, but he's doing pretty well for himself.
