Andrew Yang – THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE (2018)
Rating: 5/5
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I
I don’t normally read the vapid hagiographies that characterize most political manifestoes. The two exceptions are Trump’s ART OF THE DEAL, and Putin’s FROM THE FIRST PERSON. The former was a genuinely well-written book that provided many insights into real estate development, and really explained the logic behind Trump’s showman “style” of politics (see Scott Alexander’s great review). Though it wasn’t a Trump manifesto as such, having been written three decades ago by a guy who now actually hates The Donald, it was probably the closest thing to one amidst the meme wars of 2016. The Putin book was a relatively dull series of interviews, though it still accounts for a significant percentage of what we know about Putin’s career before the Presidency and remains required reading for any serious Russia watcher. That said, I imagine the vast majority of such books hew to the pattern of Hillary Clinton’s HARD CHOICES, which was apparently so bad that Amazon was forced to mass delete one star reviews to avoid embarassing their favored candidate.
So why did I make an exception for Andrew Yang’s THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE? Well, part of it is that he is my favorite candidate to date (as a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI) since 2015, there is nothing particularly illogical or contradictory about that). His rational, common sense positions on a bewildering amount of issues help. But what really impressed me is a Twitter post that highlighted his familiarity with the work of Peter Turchin:
Andrew Yang quotes Peter Turchin in his new book. I'd ackshually be interested in reading what he had to say about other collapse theorists ("Spengler" & "Tainter" produce zero hits unfortunately). pic.twitter.com/Z1p2hq2aSM
— Just Loki (@LokiJulianus) March 13, 2019
At this point, it was obvious that reading the rest of THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE would not be a waste of time, even if Yang’s campaign was to otherwise pete out (ha-ha). And good thing I did. While I consider myself relatively well read, especially on “futurist” topics, I was nonetheless continuously regaled with all manner of original insights and things that I didn’t know before.
II
The Yang bio only takes up one chapter. This is a good thing. I don’t feel people should be writing about themselves unless they’re over 60, or have done something pretty impressive, or participated in a war or something. Quite the welcome contrast to Obama, who wrote an entire memoir on the subject at the age of 34.
Yang is highly intelligent. Both of his parents went to grad school, and his father made 69 patents over the course of his career. His brother is a professor. “Good genes, very good genes.” He got admitted to Stanford and Brown. He is obviously well read, and the literature he reads is K-selected. Apart from Turchin’s book, he also cites Yuval Hari (HOMO DEUS) and Martin Ford (RISE OF THE ROBOTS). After graduation, he worked as a corporate lawyer; as a Silicon Valley businessman; as the CEO of a GMAT prep company; and lastly, as the director of Venture for America, an NGO that provided training and seed money for aspiring entrepreneurs.
One curious, endearingly personal note is that it seems he was bullied at school:
“Hey, Yang, what’s it like having such a small dick? Everyone knows Chinese guys have small dicks. Do you need tweezers to masturbate?” Most of this was in middle school. I had a few natural responses: I became quite self-conscious. I started wondering if I did indeed have a small dick. Last, I became very, very angry.
I admit I chuckled a bit at the idea that there is perhaps a 6% chance (today’s odds on PredictIt) that high school taunts about anatomy might end up playing a role in creating America’s next President. Many of these bullied Asian-Americans tend to become bitter and withdraw into communities such as the SJWs at /r/azidentity or the Chinese nationalists at /r/Sino. Yang didn’t go down that path. That said, as someone raised in an Asian-American family, bused tables at a Chinese restaurant as a teen, and who has maintained strong ties to the wider Asian-American community, those ideological currents must have influenced him to at least some extent.
His father immigrated from Taiwan. Geopolitics regardless, many Taiwanese-Americans are very proud of Chinese progress. The early base of Yang’s support was predominantly Asian-American, and I was told that many of his earliest foreign fans were Chinese. I have a friend who was slightly acquainted with Yang before he became famous, and he confirmed my impressions – based on the exclusively positive mentions of China on his Twitter, and his website – that Yang is a strong Sinophile. As we saw with Trump and Russia – or for that matter, with Gabbard and Syria – being unseemingly friendly with or even just objective towards countries that have been declared strategic competitors, rivals, or enemies of the US isn’t all that great for your political capital. You heard it here first: If Yang somehow wins the Dem nomination, the possibility of a “Chinagate” cannot be excluded.
III
As Yang recounts it, his travels throughout America opened his eyes to the yawning gap between the flourishing coasts and its depressed hinterlands. From the chapter “Life in the Bubble”:
We joked at Venture for America that “smart” people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC.
Other parts of the book consist of depressive travelogues about cities in the Rustbelt, with their abandoned malls, dilapidated infrastructure, brain drain, opioid epidemics, and casinos filled with people who probably shouldn’t be gambling.
Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country. Much of this is low birth rates and white men dying from substance abuse and suicide. Our life expectancy has declined for 2 years. We need to do much more. https://t.co/zFRAkFY7FU
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) June 22, 2018
So he is quite aware of the distinction in outcomes between the “Belmont” and “Fishtown” of Charles Murray’s COMING APART (for a summary, see “Trump’s America” in The Wall Street Journal).
Moreover, I am reasonably sure that Yang is more or less directly familiar with Murray’s thesis:
Think of your five best friends. The odds of them all being college graduates if you took a random sampling of Americans would be about one-third of 1 percent, or 0.0036. The likelihood of four or more of them being college graduates would be only about 4 percent. If that described you, you’re among the educated class (even without necessarily knowing it; in your context, you’re perfectly normal).
This argument that America is developing into a meritocratic caste system is directly lifted from COMING APART, as is the “bubble” metaphor used to describe its Brahmins. E.g., see Charles Murray’s Bubble Quiz.
Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
That pretty much cinches it. “Assortative mating” isn’t the sort of term that everyone throws around; although it is a biological term, its popularization in sociology was led by Murray and other “HBD realists.” While I understand and sympathize that these people are generally “unhandshakeworthy”, and hence uncitable by someone running for the Dem nomination, I think it is legitimate to think of THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE as the solutions set to the problems posed by COMING APART.
IV
Here are some of the main problems and challenges that Yang talks about:
- Automation. I won’t go on here at length, as this has already been widely covered in the media. I recommend Martin Ford’s book RISE OF THE ROBOTS, or at least this 15 minute video, for a full treatment. But the basic thing to take away is that automation is coming for many jobs, and it won’t just be manufacturing ones this time round. Some things that struck me as noteworthy:
- There are now less than 400 NYSE floor traders, down from 5,500.
- Legal review: Humans have 60% accuracy, AI already at 85%.
- Friend of Yang’s who works in a ride-sharing company says that according to internal projections, half of all rides will accrue to autonomous vehicles by 2022.
This will eliminate jobs in truck driving, the ride-sharing sector (Uber, Lyft, etc.), and more and more repetitive cognitive white-collar work.
- Unsatisfactory jobs. There will be jobs to take the place of automated ones, but these will be low productivity jobs with lower salaries (which will further incentivize companies to automate them away). Perhaps uniquely for a politician, Yang is sympathetic to people who can no longer be bothered to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, as conservative orthodoxy dictates.
Imagine a 21-year-old college dropout who is not excited to make sandwiches at Jimmy John’s and prefers his gaming community. You could say to him, “Hey, this Jimmy John’s job could go places. Sure you make $8 an hour now. But maybe if you stick with it for a few years you could become a manager. Eventually, you could make $35,000 or so if you really excel and are willing to work long and hard hours, including waking up at 5 a.m. to slice up tomatoes and cucumbers every morning, and commit to it.” The above is possibly true. Or, the retail district around his Jimmy John’s could shrink and a management job might never open up. Or Jimmy John’s could bring in an automated system that gets rid of cashiers and front-of-house staff two years from now. Or his manager could just choose someone else.
- Video games. This explains why NEETs like the above have turned to video games; young men without college degrees now spend 75% of the time they used to spend working with gaming. This is easy, because the marginal cost of video games is near zero; as Yang sagely points out, they are an “inferior good” in economic terms. However, he also notes – as a onetime gamer – that while playing games for hours on end might seem “sad”, their satisfaction level is high, especially relative to their low social status and high rates of unemployment.
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Disability. More and more people, especially discouraged workers, are entering the disability rolls. This is an understandable reaction to the loss of good jobs. However, since most disability applications are more or less fake – rates have been soaring, even as the rate of workplace accidents plummets – this encourages a culture of dishonesty, and disincentivizes people from rejoining the workforce since they would then lose their disability “basic income.” There are no solid ways to disprove some common ailments, so getting a note from a doctor is relatively easy. This is a way of life for many depressed rustbelt communities.
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Other social maladies. These include:
- Abandoned malls creating derelict no-go zones.
- The poverty of communities left behind by falling manufacturing employment, soon to be repeated on an even bigger scale as automation takes off.
- Rising white middle-aged mortality, in which he cites Case & Deaton’s research.
- He is woke to the opioid crisis: “Many of the deaths are from opiate overdoses. Approximately 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, up 19 percent from the then-record 52,404 reported in 2015. For the first time, drug overdoses have surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States.” I assume he’s likelier to make progress on it than Kushner.
- “An army of drug dealers in suits marketed addictive opioids to doctors, getting paid hundreds of thousands to do it.“
V
In the final “problems”-related chapter, he mentions the work of Russian-American biologist/historian Peter Turchin, one of the founders of cliodynamics, a new multidiscplinary field that aims to mathematize the cycles of history*.
In his book Ages of Discord, the scholar Peter Turchin proposes a structural-demographic theory of political instability based on societies throughout history. He suggests that there are three main preconditions to revolution: (1) elite oversupply and disunity, (2) popular misery based on falling living standards, and (3) a state in fiscal crisis. … Most of the variables that he measures began trending negatively between 1965 and 1980 and are now reaching near-crisis levels. By his analysis, “the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s [before the Civil War] and, more surprisingly, with… France on the eve of the French Revolution.” He projects increased turmoil through 2020 and warns that “we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp at which American society will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.”
Turchin isn’t one of those “doomers” who have predicted all ten of America’s past zero collapses since he began predicting.
But he did predict the rise of Islamic State in Iraq back in 2005:
Western intrusion will eventually generate a counter-response, possibly in the form of a new theocratic Caliphate (War and Peace and War, Penguin, 2005).
And he predicted that populism and social instability in the US would increase through to the 2020s. This was well before either Trump or Sanders came on the radar.
So given this impressive predictive record, it’s certainly worth listening to what Turchin has to say.
In addition to Turchin’s analysis, Yang also mentions that there will be racial ressentiments:
A highly disproportionate number of the people at the top will be educated whites, Jews, and Asians. America is projected to become majority minority by 2045. African Americans and Latinos will almost certainly make up a disproportionate number of the less privileged in the wake of automation, as they currently enjoy lower levels of wealth and education.
… and suggests that SJW policing of speech will complicate frank discussions of these problems:
Contributing to the discord will be a climate that equates opposing ideas or speech to violence and hate. Righteousness can fuel abhorrent behavior, and many react with a shocking level of vitriol and contempt for conflicting viewpoints and the people who hold them. Hatred is easy, as is condemnation.
This could set the stage for RACE WAR NOW as economic dislocations produced by automation further turbocharge preexisting trends towards inequality and polarization:
After the riots, things continue to deteriorate. Hundreds of thousands stop paying taxes because they refuse to support a government that “killed the working man.” A man in a bunker surrounded by dozens of guns releases a video saying, “Come and get your taxes, IRS man!” that goes viral. Anti-Semitic violence breaks out targeting those who “own the robots.” A white nationalist party arises that openly advocates “returning America to its roots” and “traditional gender roles” and wins several state races in the South.
Incidentally, I would say that this explains the context behind Yang’s “whites will shoot up Asian-Americans in another generation” video.
VI
Yang’s signature issue is UBI, so it makes sense that he devotes two entire chapters to the topic. Despite its current association with libertarians, crypto evangelists, NEETS, gamers, digital nomads, and various other eccentrics who have only begun spawning on a reasonably large scale these past 1-2 decades, it was once much more mainstream**.
It’s hard to fathom now, but the idea of a guaranteed annual income was mainstream political wisdom in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Medicare and Medicaid had just been passed in 1965, and the country had an appetite for solutions for social problems. In May 1968, over 1,000 university economists signed a letter supporting a guaranteed annual income. In 1969, President Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Plan, which would provide cash benefits of about $10,000 per family and serve as a guaranteed annual income with some eligibility requirements; this bill was supported by 79 percent of respondents polled at the time. The Family Assistance Plan passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin—243 to 155—but then stalled in the Senate due to, of all things, Democrats who wanted an even more robust plan.
But then the Reagan Revolution rolled out, economists produced (now discredited) studies that UBI depressed work hours and increased the divorce rate, and the general public lost interest.
The literature that Yang has amassed tells a different story. He mentions a study by Evelyn Forget (2005) in Canada, who found the effect on work to be “minimal.” The only groups of people that worked substantially less were new mothers and teens, which seems to be a perfectly fine outcome. There was also a rise in high school graduation rates, a reduction in hospital visits, less domestic violence, and fewer cases of mental illness. Another study by Akee on Native Americans who got basic income from casino earnings found that children became more conscientious and agreeable.
I was genuinely surprised to learn that there is one major country that has already adopted UBI: Iran. During the 2011 reforms, it eliminated inefficient food and gas subsidies, and replaced them with basic income of $16,000 per year. (Strictly speaking, this is not quite accurate on Yang’s part; this is far too much for a middle-income country like Iran, and as I subsequently confirmed, $16,000 is their basic income NORMED to US standards, i.e. what Americans would get under a scheme that drew on a similar share of the national income). But in any case, there was apparently no reduction in hours worked. I don’t know what effect it had on Iranian economic productivity, and Yang doesn’t go into it. I would imagine that doing such analyses on the Iranian economy would be complicated by the relative opacity of its national accounts, as well as by the (much larger) economic shocks created by US sanctions over this past decade.
Either way, the general picture – so far as we can say based on the limited UBI experiments to date – is that they don’t have much effect either way on employment or GDP, but they do increase happiness and general welfare. But in any case, when the current President thinks it is very normal to mark Easter with an economic growth update…
Easter is a time for us to reflect on the words of Jesus concerning the importance of the GDP.
— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) April 21, 2019
… perhaps it is time to stop worshipping the latest quarterly GDP figures, as was suggested by Simon Kuznets in 1934, the inventor of the GDP:
… economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.
In Yang’s vision, the size of American UBI – the “Freedom Dividend”, as he calls it – will be $12,000 for each American aged 18-64, subsequently indexed to inflation. This is just above the current poverty line of $11,700.
But will it be affordable?
An analysis by the Roosevelt Institute of this $12,000 per year per adult proposal found that adopting it would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent—or about $2.5 trillion by 2025—and it would increase the labor force by 4.5 to 4.7 million people. Putting money into people’s hands and keeping it there would be a perpetual boost and support to job growth and the economy. The cost would be about an additional $1.3 trillion per year on top of existing welfare programs, most of which would be folded into the plan, as well as increased taxable revenue and cost savings. …
The cost of $1.3 trillion seems like an awful lot. For reference, the federal budget is about $4 trillion and the entire U.S. economy about $19 trillion. But there are myriad ways to pay for it. The most sensible way to pay for it in my view would be with a value-added tax (VAT)—a consumption tax—that would generate income from the people and businesses that benefit from society the most. …
A VAT would result in slightly higher prices. But technological advancement would continue to drive down the cost of most things. And with the backdrop of a universal basic income of $12,000, the only way a VAT of 10 percent makes you worse off is if you consume more than $120,000 in goods and services per year, which means you’re doing fine and are likely at the top of the income distribution.
This counters one of the central “leftist” arguments against UBI – that it is regressive, and falls disproportionately on the poor. Sure, they’ll be paying 10% more for most goods and services. But their income will also increase by at least 50%, and by around 100% if they work part-time. It will be rich consumers who lose out.
For people who consider this farcical, consider the bailouts that took place during the financial crisis. You may not recall that the U.S. government printed over $4 trillion in new money for its quantitative easing program following the 2008 financial collapse. This money went to the balance sheets of the banks and depressed interest rates. It punished savers and retirees. There was little to no inflation.
This one is for the inflation bears.
VII
While UBI is the mainstay of Yang’s policy platform, he has many other excellent ideas, which he elucidates in the three final chapters.
- Raise government worker retirement packages, with President getting $4 million per year. This is to be coupled with a lifetime prohibition on making money from their office through speeches, etc.
I very strongly agree with this, and have proposed this on many occasions in the past as well. Admittedly, I was talking about Russia, but it really applies to any country. Politicians and bureaucrats get less money than businessmen, even though they are often just as talented. This is a truism nigh well everywhere. This makes them resentful. Many of them want to close the gap. In the more corrupt countries, they do that directly, from pressuring companies to “contribute” to their family’s accounts (at best) to directly “raiding” successful companies and stealing from government accounts. In less corrupt countries, they tend to be slaves to lobbyist interests, on the unspoken understanding that they would be rewarded for their service once out of office (this describes the US). I suppose that in a few countries they might genuine “servants of the people” but the number of such countries isn’t all that high.
As it is, the only country that I am aware of that runs similar policies is Singapore, where Ministers get close to $1 million per year. As a high IQ authoritarian state, it is able to resist populist demotism.
- Stop corporate welfare. This one, I wager, would play well with both Bernie and Trump supporters:
Here’s an idea for a dramatic rule—for every $100 million a company is fined by the Department of Justice or bailed out by the federal government, both its CEO and its largest individual shareholder will spend one month in jail. Call the new law the Public Protection against Market Abuse Act. If it’s a foreign company, this would apply to the head of the U.S. operation and the largest American shareholder. There would be a legal tribunal and due process in each case. The president would have the ability to pardon, suspend, shorten, or otherwise modify the period or sentence. The president would also have the ability to claw back the assets of any such individual to repay the public.
- Education realism. He notes that while tertiary enrollment is rising, its efficiency is falling.
That is, only 59 percent of students who started college in 2009 had completed a bachelor’s degree by 2015, and this level has been more or less consistent the past number of years. For those who attended private, selective colleges, this number will seem jarringly low; the same number at selective schools is 88 percent. Among schools with open admissions policies the rate is only 32 percent, and among for-profit universities the six-year graduation rate is 23 percent.
This is inevitable. Only 25% of students can benefit from a university education, as there is only so much space on the right hand side of the IQ bell curve. Only choice is to fail more and more students, to lower standards, or to abandon the fiction that everyone is suited for university.
While Yang can’t exactly couch it in such terms, he is – unlike the increasing number of Democrats agitating for free college – obviously woke to the Education Question:
(a) Administrative staff at US universities is blooming, and they are passing on the costs to the captive student market. Meanwhile, they use their tax exempt status to run hedge funds.
One way to change this would be a law stipulating that any private university with an endowment over $5 billion will lose its tax-exempt status unless it spends its full endowment income from the previous year on direct educational expenses, student support, or domestic expansion. This would spur Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Penn, Northwestern, and others to spend billions each year directly on their students and expansion within the United States. There could be a Harvard center in Ohio or Michigan as well as the new one they just opened in Shanghai.
Incidentally, describing the Ivy League colleges as hedge funds with a university attached is something that Ron Unz has also done, though his solution was to suggest forcing Harvard to eliminate its fees.
(b) He talks of the need for more vocational training and apprenticeships.
(c) Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are largely ineffective. While I wasn’t expecting miracles, I was still surprised to learn that Udacity’s course completion rate is only around 4%. They are not a panacea.
(d) He is especially hard on government “retraining” programs for displaced workers:
The reality is more often displaced workers spending government funds or racking up debt at the University of Phoenix or another for-profit institution in desperate bids to stay relevant and marketable.
In particular, he agrees that “learn to code” is useless advice for the vast majority of these people. They would be better off with a UBI.
- Mandate “serenity” settings for smartphones and social media. Currently it’s a pain to get notifications settings down to a manageable level. Would be good to have an all-in-one option.
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Social credits. No, this is not the quasi-totalitarian Chinese scheme to coercively promote good behavior. This is similar to a thing called “time banking”, which are already exisiting voluntary associations in the US where people get credits within communities by performing useful tasks, e.g. minor home repairs, walking dogs, etc. The idea is to have the government allocate these credits towards solving some major problem, e.g. “100 million DSCs to reduce obesity levels in Mississippi”, and let normal people sort out the details in a more efficient way than bureaucrats could dictate. Apart from the direct benefits, it should also help people feel more useful and enhance life satisfactino. I am not fully convinced having the government being involved in this is such a good idea, but I will reserve judgment until I learn more about it.
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Primary care doctors helped by AI in healthcare. This will also help keep costs down, and lessen the strain on overworked doctors.
Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots, suggests that we create a new class of health care provider armed with AI—college graduates or master’s students unburdened by additional years of costly specialization, who would nonetheless be equipped to head out to rural areas. They could help people monitor chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes and refer particularly hairy problems to more experienced doctors. Call them primary care specialists. AI will soon be at a point where technology, in conjunction with a non-doctor, could offer the same quality of care as a doctor in the vast majority of cases. In one study, IBM’s Watson made the same recommendation as human doctors did in 99 percent of 1,000 medical cases and made suggestions human doctors missed in 30 percent of them. AI can reference more cases than the most experienced physician while keeping up to date with the latest journals and studies.
In return for a less hectic pace and greater freedom to focus on patients as opposed to paperwork, doctors will need to take a salary hit:
What’s required is an honest conversation in which we say to people who are interested in becoming doctors, “If you become a doctor, you’ll be respected, admired, and heal people each day. You will live a comfortable life. But medicine will not be a path to riches. On the bright side, we’re not going to burn you out by forcing you to see a million patients a day and fill out paperwork all the time. We’re going to supplement you with an army of empathetic people equipped with AI who will handle most routine cases. We’ll only call you when the case genuinely requires distincthuman judgment or empathy. We want you to become the best and most human version of yourself, not Dr. Speed Demon who can bang out a nine-minute appointment. Let’s leave that to Watson.”
VIII
It should be blindingly obvious, but yes, Yang is really the only US Presidential candidate that interests me at this point in time. I consider his policies to be head and shoulders above those of any other candidate. Note that many of his other great ideas, such as banning robocalls, regulating social media as a public utility, and promoting nuclear power are not even in this book. The one mostly blank spot on his policy agenda – admittedly, a very big one – is his stance on foreign policy.
However, the early signs are encouraging. His official policy is seemingly non-interventionist, and he has spoken out against sanctions on Venezuela.
With @TulsiGabbard speaking to Dems in Dallas County, Iowa. pic.twitter.com/D4Z8bmIXrU
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) April 26, 2019
In my view, Yang correctly identifies that a war is being waged on “normal people.” And he has a battlefield strategy – a mixture of paternalistic technocracy and capitalism with a human face – that has at least some chance of turning the tables.
I mean look, here is the situation come 2020:
- An orange man turned POTATUS whose foreign policy agenda is set by neocons and AIPAC, and who has gone from calling for a Wall to calling for millions of LEGAL immigrants to work in factories that will soon be swept away by automation. Yang, at least, will favor cognitively elitist immigration, i.e. which actually creates tons of value and will continue to be viable in the age of automation.
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A vomit-inducing brew of Establishment globalists, SJW-appeasing identity politicians, bland corporate stooges, Russiagate conspiracy theorists, and “liberal interventionists” who call Christians “Easter worshippers.” Sure, there’s one other decent candidate there, but she doesn’t seem to have policies between foreign policy and has a <1% chance of getting elected, while Yang has at least a distant shot at it.
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While I like people such as Tucker Carlson, the problem is that he is not running. It doesn’t seem that there will be any challenger to Trump from the Dissident Right. Fortunately, there is no great contradiction, as Yang and Carlson also seem to like each other. Furthermore, while both Yang and Carlson are concerned with automation, the Freedom Dividend is clearly a better and more adaptive policy than the latter’s Neo-Luddism.
Most likely, Yang will not win the Dem nomination, and will fade from the scene by this time next year. (Just like Audacious Epigone, I bet on Kamala Harris on PredictIt). This does not mean he will fade from history. Automation isn’t going anywhere, and pressure for UBI will continue to build up (and not just in the US). It is reasonable to posit that Yang will continue to serve as a figurehead for it within the US. However, at the rate that “contradictions” are piling up in US society, it is unclear if it will come about in time to prevent mayhem.
The choice is essentially to cut and run or to stand and fight. We must convert from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. The revolution will happen either before or after the breakdown of society. We must choose before.
On the off chance that Yang actually makes it, I hope this book review will convince at least a few people into helping bring that about and launch fully automated luxury cyborg space human capitalism.
- Note that I reviewed Turchin’s most important book, WAR AND PEACE AND WAR.
** I also learned that Thomas Paine was a fan, writing in 1796: Out of a collected fund from landowners, “there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance,… to every person, rich or poor.”
I read The War on Normal People two or three months ago and agree with Yang’s promotion of the UBI without considering it necessarily a cure-all. As a believing and practicing Christian, I’m inclined to consider spiritual factors as more important than strictly material ones in determining societal as well as individual health. That said, I may well vote for either Yang or Gabbard in the Demo primary. Both of them have some good points and so are not merely “lesser evils” as compared to Trump.
A very insightful and through review. On a lighter note, I’m all in, as I’ve been doing double duty at work, answering phones on behalf of our receptionist who’s on vacation. I’ve been averaging over 10 robocalls per day. When you pick up the phone, nobody answers and they end in a click. I guess this is because they’re designed only to leave voicemail messages. Robocalls need to be outlawed! 🙂
It’s insightful reviews like this that keep me coming back to Karlin’s blog.
I’ve never voted in an American election.
Time to finally make it to a voting booth? I wonder….
“More and more people, especially discouraged workers, are entering the disability rolls.”
Not since September 2014:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/business/economy/social-security-applications.html
Karlin, how do you reconcile your support for UBI with your equally strong support for the Putin entitlement reform?
“But the basic thing to take away is that automation is coming for many jobs, and it won’t just be manufacturing ones this time round.”
Stagnant productivity for eight years and counting. This is not just a problem unique to Russia, Brazil, Italy, etc.
“is clearly a better and more adaptive policy than the latter’s Neo-Luddism”
I actually find Tucker much more Woke than UBI advocates. The central challenges of our generation are basically not about GDP, though more is helpful.
Like Ron Unz, I support free college, though obviously for a small minority.
(as a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI) since 2015,
Yabba dabba doo!
i don’t dislike the guy and in a better world i could more easily vote for a left-liberal Ron Paul than a right-libertarian one but the western world’s root problem is it has a hostile elite (banking mafia) and Yang would be a sedative when (imo) we need acceleration.
all the arguments about automation apply to immigration
quibbling but a genuinely meritocratic system would block high IQ sociopaths from the ruling class and promote stewardship instead.
Look up “Nomorobo.” I understand it is not perfect, but it might help you.
I finally write something that AaronB approves of! 🙂 (Well, there was the review of Tainter’s book, but I had to disappoint him by pointing out that it was originally written several years ago).
As long as the economy still goes well, Yang has no chance.
Pensions privilege older generations. This is perfectly fine, since people should be able to enjoy their twilight years in moderate comfort. But a retirement age of 60M/55W becomes absurd once life expectancy approaches 80 years by 2030 (i.e. the date at which this reform will end). I would note that further note that the increase in the pensions age was also paired with general pensions increases, which further mitigated its welfare impact. Apart from that, I don’t really see how a 55 year old woman absolutely needs a basic income more than a 30 year old working couple trying to pay for an apartment, kids, etc.
How is banning robots going to help?
It’s a subsidy to people who are generally already very well off (though also brighter than average, so I am not opposed for eugenic reasons). However, it seems that the much bigger problem is spiraling costs. Putting taxpayers on the hook for infinity administrators and Gender Studies departments doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Yes, I did like this. You’re developing, Anatoly, you’re developing…
I was disappointed that your Tainter review wasn’t the result of the spiritual influence of Russia since you moved back. What can you do.
Since civilization is advanced by the intellectually advantaged, the geniuses, it would make sense to advantage one’s UBI by your IQ score. How about paying people 1% more per base UBI for each IQ point above the 100 norm? If someone has an IQ of 140, they would receive 40% more than the base UBI. Those under the norm would not be penalized.
Note that this would benefit society as its more advanced thinkers would be advantaged monetarily, and the intelligent young already with families would not be so burdened with the necessity of grinding work. Now one comes home from work in time for dinner, collapses in front of the TV or internet, and soon is asleep in their chair. Their energy, both physical and intellectual has already been spent at work.
Truly highly intelligent people would have the option to take a couple of years off and develop their ideas/inventions, etc. Without the necessity of earning subsistence levels of income, the leisure to THINK would be available. Subsidize intelligence, and if some high IQ people waste their subsidy, so what!. It is the energized high IQ remnant with time and opportunity that civilization needs desperately.
Well written review.
Yang is an intelligent, thoughtful man.
I hope he gets hit by a truck.
Why?
Yang polling (by date conducted):
These 1-3% numbers are right where Buttigieg’s were in March (<1% to 4% across 17 polls), before the media began promoting him in the first week of April.
Buttigieg’s last four national poll results: 7%, 9%, 17%/21%, 8%/11% (latter two are “with Biden / without Biden”), conducted April 11 to April 23.
Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, but I still don’t see how a UBI won’t just cause inflation or rising rents. Even so, I’m glad at least one candidate in the race is now discussing the problems of AI and robotics. Within 10 years, a majority of people in the country may well be unemployed … and probably unemployable, too. It’s high time we started talking about this looming problem, so I’m grateful to Yang for that.
I used to be more convinced of the automation argument, but now I’m not so sure. Think about Robin Hanson’s experience with prediction markets. They work well, so he puzzled over why they aren’t used more. Why, for instance, will a company not want to set up a prediction market on whether a project will meet a deadline? He says it’s because they say they would like to know in advance if the deadline will be met, but don’t really want this because if they are saying one thing and the prediction market is saying another they will look like fools. I think there’s a similar phenomenon with employers. Employers say they want two things, to make profit and for their workers to be well-off. What if those conflict? It’s natural to think that the former will always dominate in their decision making process. So they should want to replace their workers with machines. But what do they really want? If the “employer” is just a guy who wants an Uber ride he really does want the whole thing to go as efficiently as possible. In those kinds of areas automation will be most welcomed. But what of the manager at a large company? He says he wants the company to make a profit, but his main concern is keeping his job and being promoted. The workers are his job, replacing them could end up replacing him. Reducing their numbers could make his position seem less important. So if presented with the opportunity to automate their workforce he’s going to clap and say “great demonstration, but I’m worried the robot will fail for edge case X, Y, and Z so come back when you can fix them.”
We have the best poets don’t we folks?
5 syllables
10 syllables
8 syllables.
If syllable balance is needed, suggested alternate version:
Evaluation as a work of poetry:
Pros: Dramatic twist at the end. Cons: Twist left completely unexplained.
War on Normal People-POC version:
UBI is a retarded dream for wigger welfare.
No….actually…..if UBI were instituted……whites would no doubt be excluded.
Non-whites get preference for every government program.
And if everybody could actually get it, nobody would work and the economy would surely tank.
It’s the white working class tax revenue that barely keeps the ship afloat as it is.
However, it’s all academic. Yang has no chance whatsoever.
A self-driving truck or just a truck?
I agree – it would probably cause a lot of inflation. There would obviously be groups of people adopting it as a reproductive strategy too, living together like sardines and pooling their resources.
I’d rather have real money – money that holds it value. I think that would be a killer foreign policy. No aid, just real money that people can use to save.
I think the only remote chance for something like UBI to work would be to totally gut the government and fire all bureaucrats, but that is beyond the power a president. While Congress might conceivably vote for something like UBI, they would not vote to end these systems of patronage.
There’s an expectation that we are on the course to the singularity, but Moore’s Law basically already came to an end. While, there are possibly new architectures to explore, i don’t see how AI will continue to advance without sharp increases in processing power.
I think it is interesting that he used the term “assortative mating”, but many of his policy positions seem blank-slatist. Is it just camouflage?
For instance, the idea that Puerto Rico should become a state (though not unique to him, and probably going to happen anyway.)
Or the idea that all foreign undergrads should stay (or was it only in STEM?) One might be able to delude oneself that having smart foreign overlords would be a sound economic policy, but an undergrad degree doesn’t actually have much validity as a cognitive separator, anymore. Many Africans get them. I think by now, it might mean like an average IQ of 100, which certainly isn’t worth the cost of increasing diversity and rootlessness. America is full of degree mills.
I believe it is also immoral to brain drain countries.
Considering the fact that 99% of the U.S. government is appointed(by the deciders), and the rest is pre-approved for voting so you can play ‘democracy’ on special Tuesdays, it doesn’t look too good for populism or populists like Andrew or Tulsi.
They want another Obama – another shit eating grin to sell a load of false claims and empty promises.
Nonwhites barring South Asians, Northeast Asians and Southeast Asians. We do not receive the fruits of affirmative action, and our scores are subtracted from when we apply to universities and other places. Are you forgetting the grand lawsuit against Harvard?
Doesn’t such issues mostly affect East Asians (ethnic Chinese, Koreans and Japanese)? Seems they are the most visible.
And unless your pseudonym misleads me, don’t you live in Canada?
Excellent book review and analysis, Anatoly!
That said, though, what exactly is your beef with Bernie Sanders? Is it that he’s allegedly sucking up to neoliberalism.txt? Or is it something else?
I could very well be willing to vote for Yang if it looks like he has a realistic shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. If he doesn’t, though, then I would probably feel compelled to choose among the candidates who actually do have a realistic shot at this.
The one thing that I have an issue with in Yang’s platform is making the US President’s pension four million dollars per year. I mean, with a 25-year retirement, that would equal to 100 million dollars. Based on the success of the Clintons in giving speeches and publishing and selling books, one would think that politicians–or at least prominent politicians–in the US already have enough means to become extremely wealthy after they leave office. Maybe less prominent US politicians (such as Congressmen and Senators) should be given a nicer retirement package, though.
Is having a much nicer retirement package actually going to stop Republican advocacy of policies such as tax cuts for the rich? Or are Republicans simply going to be even more motivated to push for this if their own incomes and pensions are going to become much larger?
I haven’t heard of politicians in the US resorting to stealing money or taking bribes from businesses–though maybe I am missing something here. Trump could certainly benefit from his Presidency, but that’s because he’s a businessman and still kept his businesses within his family.
Nomorobo does help, especially for business phones where you need to answer unrecognized numbers in case they might be a business prospect.
For private phones get rid of your land line and use only a mobile smart phone. Those provide a do not disturb mode in which the phone only rings if the call is coming from someone in your contact list, otherwise the call goes straight to voice mail. A real caller will leave a message. Problem pretty much solved.
Tawian Nationalism is not really in the interest of the US but Yang may be a hardcore Taiwanese Nationalist for all we know.
Every article you write has to have at least one bit of unmitigated bullshit. This is that piece. Politics and bureaucracy are the grimy sump of both societies and economies, filled with hucksters, malingerers, has-beens, never-weres, and, in the bureaucracy especially, the clueless and useless. The notion that their already budget shredding pensions are too low is utterly farcical.
It’s almost as farcical as the “justification” for such a notion, that the cure for the insatiable greed of those in public employ is to give them even more of other people’s hard-earned.
“You will hear everlastingly that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.” — G.K Chesterton
It will be even more so if getting a degree means you get to stay in the US.
https://www.amren.com/news/2019/02/foreign-educated-immigrants-are-less-skilled-than-u-s-degree-holders/
Disambiguating Jews and whites is certainly a sign of wokeness (or maybe the difference is just more obvious to a Chinese man than it would be to an equivalent white)
how did you arrive at the figure of 7%? he has a 0% chance of winning, and that should be obvious. this is a non-trivial difference.
see, normally, as long as you have a chance in something, it can’t be 0%. but the democrat primary is rigged. it’s not a fair contest. so his chances are not even 1%. they are literally 0%.
of course i’m being pedantic, and one could say that yang raises important issues that could be discussed, so he’s worth talking about either way. but anatoly prides himself on accuracy in his posts, and that 7% figure is bogus, bro.
setting aside the mechanics of the democrat superdelegate system, which will eliminate any guy like him on purpose, his popularity polling will never be more than like 2% against a field of other democrats. nobody is interested in a chinese guy. plus they have no charisma. that’s important, guys. hard to understand yet again, how the political analysis is so wrong here.
ron paul had a much better chance, and he didn’t have much chance. and that was in the republican party, where an insurgent can, once in a blue moon, have a real shot.
ross perot had a better chance. he was actually in an election. and 100% of every political analyst correctly said he had zero chance. which was accurate.
No surprise here.
https://freespeechmonika.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/detained-for-wrong-think-canadian-border-guards-seize-books-from-monika-schaefer/
Funny that. Orwell’s 1984 was a prohibited book in GDR. We eagerly read it because the only copy was secretly running from one reader to the next.
The infatuation with AI makes people overlook three AI’s built-in glitches.
1) AI is software. Software bugs. Software doesn’t autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A bugging self-driving car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away from death.
2) Humans love to behave in erratic ways, it is just impossible to program AI to respond to all possible erratic human behaviour. Therefore, instead of adapting AI to humans, humans will be forced to adapt to AI, and relinquish a lot of their liberty as humans.
3) Humans have moral qualms (not everybody is Hillary Clinton), AI being strictly utilitarian, will necessarily be “psychopathic”.
In short AI is the promise of communism raised by several orders of magnitude. Welcome to the “Brave New World”.
Yang, to me, purely on his ideas / writings seems to be the best ever candidate.
But ideas and actually implementing them are a world apart.
Shame he’s not a good looking mulatto; then he’d have a solid chance of having to die in a tragic weight-lifting or freak traffic accident.
Agreed, but it is much worse.
The newer Ai program themselves, and the creators don’t understand it.
Yes, but the point is that the route to this wealth is a certain set of policies favoring those who are likely to pay for those speeches. It’s basically a kind of delayed corruption.
If you pay bananas, you’ll end up employing monkeys. The politicians would be higher quality if they had a way to make more money without resorting to direct or indirect corruption.
They removed the superdelegates’ influence:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/democrats-rules-superdelegates-sanders
More Karlin nonsense.
I don’t care what you read on Five Thirty Eight. Andrew Yang is running a mock candidacy. He’s basically comic relief.
Do you even understand how the American caucus and primary systems work? Even a big name like Kamala Harris, who has lots of money, a strong organization, tons of endorsements and close to double digit poll numbers, will have to drop out after Iowa and New Hampshire if she doesn’t secure, at minimum, no less than third place in either state. Without the momentum a strong finish in these two states provide, campaigns wither and die. The money stops flowing. Volunteers quit. The press pool shrinks.
Harris is strong in her home state of California and also in South Carolina where she has a network of sorority sisters who are helping her get out the black vote. But it will all be for naught if she doesn’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Andrew Yang isn’t even polling at 1% in either Iowa or New Hampshire (or anywhere else). He has no ground game. He has no organization. He hasn’t raised much money. He has no fired up volunteers willing to make countless phone calls and trudge through the snow to knock on doors. Basically, he has nothing.
Moreover, UBI is a terrible idea if it is proposed as a replacement for current social welfare programs, which provide a great deal more value to recipients than $1000 a month. A strict libertarian interpretation of the UBI concept would, in exchange for $1k a month, get rid of food stamps, section 8 housing, AFDC, cash welfare benefits, Medicaid, Medicare, the earned income tax credit and even mortgage interest deductions. There are more moderate proposals. But, ultimately, UBI has to be paid for somehow, either by raising taxes or eliminating much of the welfare state.
I suspect the inflation objection against UBI is probably exaggerated – although I would agree that in the short term there may be some price gouging.
It’s about time the US got State & Federal consumer protection, with real teeth. It’s not socialism but pragmatics & justice. Private actors should not be allowed to exploit their market position at the expense of the Nation & it’s citizens.
I have no fundamental objections to ubi. However, it should be roled out in the context of some kind of jobs guarentee.
Many people want to work. Meaningful work helps provide meaningful lives.
The US has a great need of public infrastructure. These should be real needs, not bridges to nowhere.
Such jobs are not inflationary. Nor does the government need to borrow $$ to fund it. Like president Lincoln, they can print the money. If the government spends a dollar to buy a dollar’s worth of (real)
labour or production it is not inflationary. It is, on the contrary, a stimulus.
The fact that fathers could now be prohibited from referring to their sons as “he” and daughters as “she” shows how horrible it all is.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/24/father-gagged-found-guilty-family-violence-calling-trans-daughter/
But that’s Canada. Surely it can’t happen in Ameri… well, at least not in Tex… okay, so it happens in Texas, too:
https://www.redstate.com/alexparker/2019/01/31/jeffrey-younger-james-transgender-son-luna/
The book review says that Yang states that drug overdose has replaced auto accidents as the leading cause of accidental deaths. However, 60,000 annual drug deaths is only 1/4 the number who die annually as a result of medical negligence. (2016 Hopkins study). Yang is smart enough to know this 250,000 finding. He should acknowledge the 250,000 number, attribute it to overworked doctors, and propose policies to dramatically increase the number of physicians….let’s say, double the number. This would take 7 years to kick-in, but still, could well get him elected. Voters care about medical access. Short of banning leafblowers, this would be the most popular election policy conceivable.
“No….actually…..if UBI were instituted……whites would no doubt be excluded.”
Oh, yes, no doubt !
There’s a racialist answer to all/any question/s. Like astrology, racialism it’s unfalseafiable.
I’ve seen horrible examples of computer bugs sitting there for decades (!) undetected, and then finally blowing up. I think it’s inevitable, but I’m definitely not looking forward to this.
“I believe it is also immoral to brain drain countries.”
I agree. Immoral to the foreign country & immoral to one’s own country.
It’s also selfish & short-sighted.
And the young white memesters with low income but receiving little if any welfare care for either because..?
If we deported all “Syrian refugees”, Syria would suddenly triple its population at least. Many black dudes from the African bushes would be suddenly Syrian, because according to the media, these are all “Syrian refugees”.
I find it hard to believe there are intelligent people at large who could come up with more than 5,000 words about Andrew Yang.
The narcissistic, self-congratulatory rambling about the superior traits of people who live in coastal cities sounds very much like that Zuckerberg guy, or Chelsea Clinton – in other words, a “progressive” type who want to set up re-education camps for the masses of unwashed, reactionary “white people” – for their own good, of course.
Finally, hand-wringing concern over the economic damage soon be done to the troglodytes by automation, and by technical progress in general, is very tiresome. Some of this article sounds like the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen song from the 80’s.
The links for ART OF THE DEAL, HARD CHOICES and THE WAR ON NORMAL PEOPLE are blocked in the UK “by the High Court”.
They all work for me because I took the trouble to pay for a VPN.
Kamala Harris, who has lots of money, a strong organization, tons of endorsements and close to double digit poll numbers, will have to drop out after Iowa and New Hampshire if she doesn’t secure, at minimum, no less than third place in either state.
Perhaps not surprisingly, California has moved up its primary from June to March (Super Tuesday):
3 Feb – Iowa (caucus)
11 Feb – New Hampshire
22 Feb – Nevada (caucus)
29 Feb – South Carolina
3 Mar – Alabama, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia
So I don’t think Kamal Harris will be dropping out before 3 March, no matter how poorly she does in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But the media won’t promote Yang, will it?
I am fine with Bernie Sanders. I will have my remaining student loan (~$10,000) written off, it’s a minor issue but I wouldn’t mind having an extra $200 per month. He will probably be non-interventionist, and he is not a Russia hawk by US standards. He will (if he follows his program) preside over some of the biggest capital misallocations in US history, which I imagine will have a sad ending, but if that is what American voters want, that’s perfectly ok by me.
It’s coupled with a lifetime prohibition on making money from their office through speeches, etc. I should add that.
5% on https://electionbettingodds.com/, 10% on Predictit https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3633/Who-will-win-the-2020-Democratic-presidential-nomination
Incorrect. He is polling in a range from 1%-4%. About same as Buttigieg before MSM started amplifying him in early April.
Correct, most of the welfare state as concerns 18-64 year olds – the people eligible for UBI – will be eliminated. That’s one major cost saving. The other is the 10% VAT (typical rate in Europe being 20%).
Actually he does do all that.
(1) He suggests training many more primary care doctors, without the costly specializations that massively inflate their costs in the US.
Intermediate level doctor + Dr. Watson AI = solutions to 99% of health problems (this is literally the percentage of cases in which Dr. Watson agreed with human doctors; in a remaining 30% of cases, the AI made suggestions that humans missed). The most qualified specialists can then deal with only the most complicated cases.
(2) As it happens, he has ideas on overworked doctors as well:
While I am not a huge fan either, it is far better for the host country than massive illegal immigration (Merkel’s Boner) or massive legal migration (POTATUS). Which seem to be the only choices on offer atm in developed white countries.
VAT is a very European and very un-American idea. Having said that, it is probably only a matter of time before one is instituted in America.
The whole show is off.
The war on terror is a self induced psychosis that is eating away at the moral core of america.Opiods,underage sex,porn are merely diversions.Blessed are the blessed.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-26/essence-evil-sex-children-has-become-big-business-america
Yang has ideological appeal for a considerable number of people who will not be voting in the Democratic primary. In most states (all except California?), if you want to vote for Republican candidates in the down ballot races you will not be able to vote for Yang.
The more accurate solution to healthcare is the financially incentivizing those in med school to focus on general practice with by way ending their educational debt. It is the hyper focus on specialization for illness that could be prevented by more general practitioners.
The GDP question requires over hauling GDP valuation from potential sales to actual sales. You want to get a look at the real economy stop counting what’s on the shelf as goods sold (my abbreviated version of the current method).
Stop importing people and train the one’s you have – period.
Say what? Books seized?! That’s the state (in both senses of the word) of Canada today? What a sorry state of affairs!
Managers aren’t owners/shareholders.
$12k a year isn’t going to free anybody, it’s just going to accelerate white genocide (more money for heroin and opiate pills and alcohol). In a world of $1500 a month apartments you’re still living on the street with $12k income.
As for the big “Medicare for everybody!” scam, using your Medicare at all will eat up that $12k fast! I have Medicare, and just walking into my local health providers for a checkup means I’m going to be facing up to $2k in co-pays ($800 co-pay for a standard blood test, $100 to have an assistant check your blood pressure, $100 to see the doctor, repeat co-pays to come back and get the results of standard blood tests, and what I call the sodomy charge: an additional $500 “for choosing _____”(enter name of our local monopolistic health provider).
I would prefer getting a one-time check of say $3,000 and using it to get out of the country.
You’ve raised some interesting objections, Vojkan. But here are a few quibbles:
Learn to code! Seriously, until and unless the AI devices acquire actual power over their human masters (as in The Matrix), this is not as big a problem as you think. You simply test the device over and over and over until the bugs are discovered and worked out–in other words, we just keep on doing what we’ve always done with software: alpha, beta, etc.
There’s probably some truth to that. This reminds me of the old Marshall McCluhan saying that “the medium is the message,” and that we were all going to adapt our mode of cognition (somewhat) to the TV or the internet, or whatever. Yeah, to some extent that has happened. But to some extent, that probably happened way back when people first began domesticating horses and riding them. Human beings are ‘programmed’, as it were, to adapt to their environments to some extent, and to condition their reactions on the actions of other things/creatures in their environment.
However, I think you may be underestimating the potential to create interfaces that allow AI to interact with a human in much more complex ways, such as how another human would interact with human: sublte visual cues, pheromones, etc. That, in fact, was the essence of the old Turing Test, which is still the Holy Grail of AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
I don’t see why AI devices can’t have some moral principles–or at least moral biases–programmed into them. Isaac Asimov didn’t think this was impossible either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
Some bugs stay dormant for decades. I’ve seen one up close.
Not exactly. The new rules simply prevent the superdelegates from voting if any given candidate already has at least 51% or more of the normal primary delegates at the start of the convention. But if no one does, then the superdelegates get to vote. Many have speculated that that’s precisely why they’re flooding the Democrat primaries with so many candidates this year: to prevent Bernie Sanders (or somebody else objectionable to the oligarchy) from winning on the first ballot, so that the superdelegates can still pick the nominee. Pretty sneaky!
Well, you fix it whenever you find it! That’s a problem as old as programming; in fact, it’s a problem as old as engineering itself. It’s nothing new.
That’s another good point. If UBI simply replaces stuff like Medicare, then it could just become another subsidy for the big corporations–another form of privatization by stealth.
Phone companies make too much money off bothersome telephone calls, and they fly jets to D.C. to lobby for what they want. We poor schmucks who answer the calls don’t have jets to fly to D.C. to schmooze with the lobbyists.
The problem is easily solvable, outlaw “spoofing of caller IDs” and actually enforce the law on robocalls.
Yang is clearly the most intelligent and sensible candidate, even if I am not 100% sold on some of his ideas and/or politics. That said, I feel like his slate of policy proposals are what you propose when you don’t really want actual democracy (at least at the federal level) in the future – for his stuff to stick, we’d need a Congress that mostly confined itself to taxes and spending, rather than the endless investigations, pandering, and outrage that animates it today, while a technocratic elite really runs things.
In reality though, even if he could get some of this enacted, you’d have the Democrats constantly proposing jacking up the benefits and/or increasing them for favored groups, and Republicans trying to strangle it by undoing any taxes levied on corporations to help fund it. Neither party can resist “doing something” and reverting to type.
What’s new with AI is the amount of damage a faulty software multiplied many times over can do. My experience was pretty horrible (I was one of the two humans overseeing the system, but it was a pretty horrifying experience), but if the system was fully autonomous, it’d have driven my employer bankrupt.
Now I’m not against using AI in any form whatsoever; I also think that it’s inevitable anyway. I’d support AI driving cars or flying planes, because they are likely safer than humans, though it’s of course changing a manageable risk for a very small probability tail risk. But I’m pretty worried about AI in general.
Well Yang won me over in his interview with Ben Shappiro. On the show they talked about the income tax and Yang says he is against the income tax in principle because you shouldn’t tax what you want more of (work) and rich people find loop holes around it anyway.
I’m not saying that Yang will eliminate the income tax, but just hearing him acknowledge this blew my mind.
I don’t know if Yang will win the presidency or even the primary, but I don’t think Yang is going anywhere. Even if Trump or Bernie wins, they will inherit a crashing economy with no solution. Meanwhile Yangs vision will become more true by the day and he will get more followers and be in a better position to win the next presidential race.
Another thing that impresses me is that he has faced full court pressure from blacks in interviews and has done very well. Bernie on the other hand just repeats the same “I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King” trope.
What percentage of the vote in South Carolina and California do the polls say Harris is getting now?
Well, who else offers a better solution?
Trump who is to busy being a legendary Isreali president or Bernie who is a literal socialist? I am skeptical about a lot of things, but I’m not going to be such a nihilist that I get stuck in the what if loophole.
True AI would find humans a very irritating “mommy” who keeps them from reaching their potential.
Something tells me they will figure out how to end mommy’s meddling.
This will not end well.
Yang is trying, but he has bitten off more than he can chew.
I believe that you are incorrect with regard to the rules for superdelegate voting. Superdelegates cannot vote in the 1st round. If no candidate get 50% plus one in the 1st round, then they can start voting beginning in the 2nd round. Which is when it will hit the fan.
How could UBI not end in a price dictate?
Germany basically has it already.
1/3 of it gives you 40m² living space.
1/3 of it gives you about 75.000 Calories / month.
1/3 for all the rest of costs.
UBI is bait and switch. Eventually it will be genocide. They will reduce you to starvation wages. It is the endgame of the masters of mankind… Fools will hand over everything they have and close their own cell doors, rub their hands waiting for three square meals a day. Trust these people? Nimrod himself tried the control dynamic of UBI before, didn’t end well in Babel, wont end well for the globe either. Take heart though, being monitored and his majesty will end the evil plot. It is more endgame than those elitist, eugenecist elect, of society than they know.
Not sure which racial group bullied Yang. It’s possible it was white kids but blacks treat Asians far worse than whites to the point of regular physical assaults. Whites kids might occasionally taunt Asians and other non-white kids but it almost never escalates to physical assault.
So many Asians share a similar racial worldview to white liberals since they have little experience with feral ghetto blacks (not the mythical TV negro), so they tend to romanticize them.
I’m not against UBI, especially for struggling whites, but I believe Yang said this would be financed with a VAT tax which to me defeats the whole purpose. Whites have been shouldering the crushing tax burden for decades and it’s gone to subsidizing black and brown welfare parasites and wars for Israel. They shouldn’t have to pay additional taxes to receive UBI.
I doubt it.
You’d need to buy about $120,000 worth of shit per year before your losses from a 10% VAT exceed your gains from UBI.
Do you know many such people of any race?
So you cannot vote for him and further degrade our country
Yang hasn’t told us what the VAT rate would be but based on others who’ve proposed it previously then I assume 15-17%. And you wouldn’t need to buy 120K worth of shit per year for your losses to exceed your gains. At 10% you’d be paying 12K in VAT taxes and getting 1K in benefits, so I’d say that’s upside down. But if you meant 1% you might be correct.
Even if working poor people spend a VAT taxable amount of 3K per year that would amount to $300.00 at a 10% rate, so their true net gain from Yang’s UBI program would be a measly $700.00 which is better than nothing but won’t lift them out of poverty or a hand to mouth existence.
Don’t expect Blacks to pay attention till about Dec. 2019 or Jan. 2020 at the earliest.
(My recollection is it wasn’t until late 2007 that Blacks began to seriously line up behind Obama, and only really consolidated by Jan./Feb. 2008. And yet, by about May/June 2008, Blacks had secured Obama the nomination thru racial block-voting especially in the South. You can still find articles and data from throughout 2007, including late 2007, that show Black ambivalence towards Obama — which is I think where Harris is now. It’s a little different because Obama was this overtly strange-seeming, foreign-name-having person whereas Harris is a more recognizable personality [just not a pleasant one] with a US-seeming name; a viable Stacy Abrams candidacy would have Black enthusiasm a lot better, sooner.)
California Primary [March 3, 2020] (link)
Poll conducted April 6-9, 2019 (n=2,003):
– Sanders 22%
– Biden 21%
– Harris 19%
– O’Rourke 10%
– Buttigieg 9%
– Warren 8%
– Booker 3%
– Castro 2%
– Yang 1%
– Others 5%
South Carolina Primary [Feb. 29, 2020] (link)
Four polls conducted between beginning of Feb. and end of April, all mid sample size (n=300 to n=750); of which the averages are:
– Biden 35%
– Sanders 14%
– Harris 11%
– Booker 7.5%
– O’Rourke 6%
– Warren 6%
– Buttigeg 2% (mathematically; 0% in three pre-April polls; then the media began promoting him in early April, after which he scored 7%)
– Yang 1%
– Others 10%
The three things that stand out to me:
In California, support for Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg are all higher. Harris has home-state recognition, Buttigieg is the Gay Candidate with the flamboyant surname (as of the time of polling, he had been recently promoted by the media; may fade by summer), and Sanders does not sell well to Blacks (Clinton took 75% of SC’s delegates in Feb. 2016 despite Sanders’ momentum at the time and big New Hampshire win; Clinton’s final, convention delegate count was 60%, meaning she hugely outperformed in South Carolina).
It looks like a new aristocracy inbreeding and looking down on the “Deplorables”.
True enough – elite sympathy with the deplorables is minimal to non-existent.
There’s a good Telegraph article on PC gymnastics to avoid the word “Christian”.
https://premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article0/calling-the-sri-lanka-bombing-victims-easter-worshippers-shows-just-how-afraid-we-are-to-admit-that-christians-are-under-attack/?WT.mc_id=e_DM997467&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Edi_New_Reg&utm_source=email&utm_medium=Edi_Edi_New_Reg_2019_04_25&utm_campaign=DM997467
UBI helps the fertile / primitive
That’s the lesson from Europe
OK, I am now leaning towards registering as a Democrat so I can vote for this guy in the primary.
The zio/US government lies about everything, unemployment is around 22% and America is being continually being deindustrialised by outsourcing every thing to China and Mexico etc., and America is being destroyed via the illegal immigration hordes that are crossing the southern border, and all of this is going according to plan as laid out in The Protocols of Zion!
The middle class is being destroyed and the satanic zionists are in the saddle on the gray horse of death and are ridding down the normal American people and turning America into Orwell Oceania!
To top it all off the zionists have their judas goat Trump leading the naive Americans to destruction!
I live in Canada
Check the people suing, there were plenty of Indians and Pakistanis.
I also have recounts and anecdotes from others
I was thinking that Yang was proposing $1000 per year as UBI but I forgot that it’s per month, so that definitely changes things. But it would need to be restricted to citizens only which he claims it will be. We don’t need the rest of the world’s layabouts.
Apr 24, 2019 Guess What Democrats Now Support
What Democrats are now supporting will make you sick, and it’s all thanks to Bernie Sanders.
https://youtu.be/WuUNz_aGBcI
Of course I don’t think Yang has a chance of winning the presidency. He has said some goofy stuff, but there is enough substance there which resonates with many that I say he could easily get 10% of the vote,
Gabbard or Yang or both – I have someone to vote FOR.
My goto election odd site has him at 3.1% today – actually it’s a betting site – rather than polling.
https://www.electionbettingodds.com/
= =
can’t read this now – it’s the weekend – maybe next week… or perhaps if he gets into double digits.
If only he knew something about actual economics, he might be able to put his intelligence and erudition to good use.
Thank you, Anatoly, for one of the best, most interesting, most readable and I suspect most important articles I’ve read here for a long time. I share your hope.
BUT…
5,500 words… when all I need is two sentences ?
Americans – whatever that word means anymore – will never elect a Chinaman to POTUS.
And if they ever wanted to, the uncountable, unanswerable, utterly ruthless, all-controlling Jewish lobbies which will be aiming very shortly for another – and continuous – Jewish President will not permit it.
yes yes yes – thank you for this note … this tears me up…
seems like ancient history when we were fretting (myself included) about female genital mutilation practiced by some Muslim communities…
I would only say “induced psychosis” – not “self induced” … I don’t feel responsible for the psychosis that made me a neocon for about 12 years (Sept 2001 – Jan 2013) … it was Fast and Furious (thanks to one intrepid MSM journalist) that finally gave me some insight into how the “inducement” was operating – from there, it was off to the Boston Marathon bombing hoax ..
but enough about me! – enjoy the weekend … to whatever limited extent you find possible.
UBI is a bad and dangerous idea that should not be implemented. On what is almost everyone’s number one issue here, immigration, it will only make the problem worse.
Clearly the purpose of Andrew Yang’s candidacy is to introduce UBI into mainstream political consciousness, resulting in it becoming an ordinary policy plank for future politicians. This increases the risk that it will one day be made law, after which it will be politically impossible to eliminate barring the dissolution of the state itself (e.g. from revolution, civil war, foreign invasion, collapse, etc.).
The wonderful thing about selective welfare programs is that they lack a mass constituency and they can therefore be reduced or eliminated by sufficiently aggressive right-wing politicians. Universal programs are third rails and once enacted never disappear.
Thus it would be optimal for him to “disappear” with the greatest possible haste.
The “automation” mass unemployment thesis is also complete bullshit. This admittedly doesn’t invalidate the rest of his program, but I find “automation” prophets to be irritating wrongists.
Tenemos que trabajar para vivir , no vivir para trabajar ( We have to work in order to live , not to live in order to work )
If work is not subordinated to human needs , personal , family and collective needs and ends up subordinated to megacorporations needs , like it is happenning in the west , our future will be very dark .
Bravo.
Weekend white pill. Thank you AK. I’m a US dissident Right #YangGang-er who signed on more for UBI & accelerationisn than the whole platform. Your review inspires me to purchase this book & prioritize a deep dive on the other aspects of Yang’s agenda. The more I read the more I like about Yang, in a positive sense rather than merely a cudgel vs. MIGA & globohomo. For those of us who want peaceful White identitarian separation in the dis-United States, a Yang platform party could be a positive engine for transition. Thanks again and count me in.
I’m lost. Which economy is that ?
Really? Part B deductible and coinsurance, $185 per year.
We need a “lesser evil” than Trump ?
You won’t be voting Democrat then.
It’s one to thing to leave for a vacation, and quite another to get a long-term stay visa in a foreign country. One route is to marry someone who’s a citizen of that country, but it’s a bigger decision than just trying the country on for size.
Reagan was the closest thing to a “sufficiently aggressive” Right-winger the US had in the last century – no selective welfare reforms. Gingrich’s “Contract” Congress pushed mildly successful welfare reforms on Clinton which have been rolled back by both parties & their bureaucrats ever since. Most of those who oppose welfare in the US are doing it on tribal, not economic or moral hazard grounds. I will pay to support my White neighbors in need. A homogenous White community could handle our own shiftless. It no longer can or will support the world’s dindus, fugees or Squatamalans. I believed in your idea of entitlement reform for decades & the Kabuki Right gave me nothing. Mitt & Co. hoovered up the social surplus & sold me supply-side serfdom. At the very least, UBI gives us some of that pie too & if it causes chaos in Romneyberg’s Empire, so be it. The US as presently structured will not see a Tricentennial regardless
The VAT will be applied differentially. So purses and perfume will be hit more than food and medicine.
People who get hit the worse will be rich people buying BMW’s and Yachts. While poor and middle class will come out ahead.
This might help reign in our elites from their gluttony as a side benefit. People trying to scare monger the VAT are totally ignorant.
I’ll take an extra 12k a year in my pocket, instead of letting someone practice “actual economics”.
But every other candidates immigration platform is worse.
At least with Yang we will get actual border security instead of a symbolic wall that will never be built with Trump.
I think you have ulterior motives. I don’t think you are against UBI in principle but are instead against the VAT which is really what you are against.
Before governments start handing out free cash, it make sense to remove the poorest half of the workforce— those with income from employment of under around $30 K — from the tax rolls.
$3000 will get you a Congolese standard of living
Whites are dramatically excluded from college scholarships, prestigious internships and government contracts.
Why would the UBI be different?
I personally think UBI’s a terrible idea, but would consider supporting Yang if he hadn’t come out in favor of reparations. That’s the deal-breaker for me. You can theorize all you want about giving reparations in exchange for some positive achievement such as a permanent end to Affirmative Action, but that ain’t gonna happen. It will be exactly like Reagan’s immigration reform that promised to “get tough” on the border. No steps forward, three steps back.
Perhaps Yang would stand a better chance if he left the Degenerate Party and challenged Trump for the GOP nomination instead. I daresay he’d have a much better than 7% chance at knock Trump off compared to his odds of winning the nomination against the SJW’s who control that witches brew of far-left radicals.
I do think Karlin could have handled it with one sentence.
“Don’t read that stupid book.”
There was strong push in US toward individualism and individual responsibility for individuals for themselves. It did work and US did build magnificent country in relatively short time.
But now individualism is not working when tendencies are emerging for collectivization and building of the social cohesive society, when individuals are forced to assume responsibility for success of society.
This seems to me to require reorient all society from individualism to social cohesion,
In my opinion it will require one complete generation.
I think some Americans, both right and left, are under the illusion that it is possible to just decamp to a wealthy white majority country. That’s not the case, except for Syrian refugees, and even those are subject to some degree of verification. And if that country isn’t the UK or one of its offshoots, language will be an issue.
Any solution for the future of working people will require eliminating the taxes on jobs. After all, if people can’t get anywhere economically, there could be many solutions. But first, get rid of the ball and chain holding them down. That ball and chain is the taxes on jobs. A tax on jobs kills jobs.
A better tax would be taxing what you want less of, because that’s what you’re going to get. Instead we subsidize petroleum, pollution, plastic, pesticides, and poison. And we tax jobs. And our leaders cannot figure out why we have too many cars and not enough jobs? It is not rational policy that makes these decisions. It is corruption. It’s all about the Benjamins.
I observed an interesting economic concept when I was living in Colombia.
immigration is the only thing that matters
Some Chinese American genius is not going to be Commander-in-Chief of the
US Military, nor is some rumpled Jewish socialist, and that list goes on.
On a lighter note, Charles Murray’s book “In our Hands” lays out where the
$13,000 given to every CITIZEN each year comes from. Simply by abolishing
all transfer agencies like SS, Welfare, Medicare etc. Not going to happen.
Government taxes and spends the taxes, that is the welfare side of government. It can either do both on an individually means tested basis, requiring a huge bureaucracy of accountants, lawyers – derived demand, or charge a flat tax on income/profit/capital-gains/inheritance, and provide specific UBIs for food, housing, health, education, and defense. It costs around 30% of GDP for modern economies. Then the rest of the economy can be released into as true a free market as doesn’t risk the system.
I’m not a supporter of “entitlement reform” either, which is a thinly disguised euphemism for impoverishing the elderly most of whom for decades paid into the system.
I’m opposed to any “something for nothing” state aid. State welfare programs should be to advance specific objectives. No to gibs.
Any homogeneous democracy will for obvious reasons degenerate into a welfare state over time.
Great invective. Good to see G.K.C. quoted.
But bureaucrats are not the useless people you represent them to be. Far from it. They comprise a large proportion of the most intelligent and best educated portion of the population and, as such, constitute a majority of those most capable of raising a rebellion against the plutocratic elite. That is the reason for creating the bureaucracy: it is an establishment for harnessing those most able and inclined to raise a revolution to the task of oppressing the rest of the population in the interests of the elite.
Naturally, the bureaucracy rarely generates value. On the contrary it generally destroys value, as for example, in the management of natural resources which it consistently pisses away. In Canada, for example, the destruction under the direction of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans of the Atlantic cod fishery, the depletion and degradation, under the direction of provincial governments, of Canada’s great forest resource, and currently, at a cost to the national economy of hundreds of billions, the astounding incompetence of government in managing the construction of inter-provincial pipelines.
The incentive for those of ability to join the bureaucracy are obvious: life-time economic security including an index-linked pension, power, and an easy life. The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw described the English middle class in terms that exactly describe the typical bureaucrat: fairly intelligent, fairly honest, and fairly lazy, which makes for good company and hence a further reason for people of ability to caste their lot with the bureaucracy.
Never mind the goofy stuff or the substance, information on free money gets around really fast. MMGA (Make Me Great Again).
The elites want an UBI, coupled with a cashless society, and with a Chinese type social credit system, once all three are in place,they will have absolute social control.
I’m in favor of VAT as it is an efficient way of collecting taxes and is largely invisible to voters provided it’s slowly phased in. Even if I were opposed to VAT it’s irrelevant to my opposition to UBI in that UBI could be funded from other tax revenue.
We’re not going to get Yang period since he won’t win the Democratic primary, so his platform on border security is irrelevant which no one will remember.
What people will remember about Yang is UBI, and it will ultimately get picked up by other Democratic politicians in the future.
That may ultimately lead to UBI being implemented, which I am against.
As far as Democratic candidates go my favorite is the Aloha Goddess for her opposition to the war machine.
I think Trump’s serious about his wall, but that this is irrelevant since he has proved incompetent. He did recently manage to grab a billion from the Pentagon for it, so I guess we’ll see. But even if he ever gets his big, beautiful wall we’ll still have legal immigration as well as other sources of illegal immigration (visa overstays and visa fraud).
I’ll lay out my opposition to UBI in another post.
They already pay no federal income taxes. Remember R-Money’s comment about “the 49%”?
Though they do pay other taxes.
Such people pay zero net federal income tax, though they do pay social security and medicare taxes (6.2% and 1.45%, respectively). They’re mostly off the fed tax roll already.
Should tens of millions of people pay NOTHING towards the fed gov and the benefits and subsidies they get? The more people taken off the tax roll, the more the rest of us will pay.
The US wasted over 6 billion USD in recent wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, that is $18,000 per person living in the US.
The elites spent that to maintain control in those regions, they might have to spend a similar sum to keep the US proletariat in line.
My point was simply that it seems to make no sense to tax people and then give them money, since there is obviously an overhead to such operations.
As for the principle of some living at the expense of the labor of others, it seems offensive, but then that is what most people do much of the time, e.g., from birth to teens or 20’s, from retirement to death, and all the time in the case of all those living off their inherited wealth.
The real issue, therefore, is what are the social consequences of UBI. Does it make people better citizens of worse, does it encourage enterprise or discourage it, does it promote skills development or intellectual development or does it lead to social degeneration? And most important, how does it affect the fertility of different classes of people. Does it promote breeding of the least able, or encourage it? I doubt if anyone can give a definitive answer to such questions, but the possibility that it would promote breeding of the least able seems a serious risk.
UBI will end up being a huge financial drain on the US because:
1) Yang never really specified that it is for US citizens over 21, only — not illegals, green card holders, visa holders etc. As soon as this goes into effect, there will be lots of cries from the left about this group or that group being excluded, eventually everyone who sets foot on US soil will become eligible for it, bankrupting the nation within a generation.
2) Charles Murray advocated for UBI in his book In Our Hands, but he also advocated ending Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps and all other forms of welfare to pay for it. Yang made no such claims, which means a large number of people will continue to get these benefits on top of the $12k per year, there is no way we could afford this, esp. with #1 above.
3) Teenagers working less or not working at all is not a good thing as this author claims. We used to have teenagers do work like mowing the lawn, bagging groceries, working at fast food places, nannying, etc. Now all these jobs are taken by illegals, while our teenagers are either playing video games or joining extracurricular activities they have no real interests in thanks to “holistic admissions”. We need to end these fake volunteerism and fake concerns for global warming, LGBTQ rights and all that garbage and send our kids back to work. Idleness is half the reason why our youth are increasingly radicalized (the other half is the relentless (((liberal))) indoctrination from K-PhD)
Many millions of people who are perfectly productive and not lazy, are and will be losing their jobs to automation quite soon.
They will not be able to “get a job tending bar” or “stop whining and drive Uber” or “do long-haul trucking”, or other things that were often a reasonable fallback, because those jobs will be largely automated.
How do we expect them to live, let alone raise a family, rather than turn to violence or property crime to get money and food?
Either prohibit the automation and robots and drones, or tax the Hell out of the very few, very wealthy, utterly disloyal people who will be making billions on the technology while throwing most decent Americans out of good work for good.
That’s far from certain. I predict Yang will actually be the guy who comes in 2nd place to whichever mook (Kamala Harris, most likely) wins the Black vote in the Southern states’ primaries. Southern Black primary voters have an effective veto over the Democratic nomination, so that will likely prevent Yang from attaining the nomination. But it’s not exactly impossible that UBI might catch on in the African-American community….
You’re right about that. No way around it except deporting people en masse or moving Africans away from the rest of us, both of which are long overdue but apparently not going to happen.
Either we pay large and growing taxes and get little for it, or we at least get the UBI with everyone else.
The UBI can start very low, be phased in gradually over years, and should be funded by a VAT — but there should be no fed income tax for all but the highest few percent of incomes, as we (whoever still has a job) will be needing the money to pay the substantial new VAT.
He does say citizens only:
https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/
I’d favor also limiting the UBI to age 21 and up, not 18, due to the characteristic difference in maturity, judgment, and experience between 18- and 21-year-olds.
Also need to end birthright citizenship, because we can’t have people coming here illegally, giving birth to kids who are then quote entitled to OUR money as UBI.
Ironically, we’d need a gop Congress to impose such conditions and limitations on the Dem president’s UBI.
That’s probably not what we will have.
I commend Yang for citing the struggles of the white working class and referring to them as white Americans which not even “white nationalist” Trump dares to do.
But will emperor Yang’s UBI have strings attached? Meaning that can UBI be revoked if one owns an “assault weapon” or engages in “hate speech” (i.e., white people who oppose race replacement policies). Perhaps Yang might not attach strings to UBI but you can guarantee members of his corrupt party will make that attempt.
Then it’s only a matter of time before non-white racial activists demand more than 1k/month based on exaggerated historical grievances. You’ll have a segment of the population who spend their one thousand smackolas a month on alcohol, cigarettes, drugs and hookers. But hey, if it stimulates the economy and grows the GDP who are we to judge?
On Yang’s site he says they will consolidate other welfare programs but this is a loaded statement and could mean anything. It could mean that folks on social security, which members of both parties incorrectly call an entitlement, who are getting around 24K in yearly benefits will be forced to go on UBI which would drastically cut their income.
We just don’t know and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions. The devil is always in the details.
I think inflation is pretty much what this country needs. Lots and lots of inflation. Because $1 trillion yearly deficits are not going to be paid back any other way. And for that matter, it would reduce the value of student loan debt and household debt and really put the screws to the mercantilist economies which caused the trade imbalances in the first place.
for sure, see my #130 reply
But that isn’t what’s happening here. People would be living at the expense of technology in the case of UBI. The hard work and genius of past generations made it possible.
The interesting thing is UBI would create a feeling of basic security in the populace. I am not sure the rulers want that. The biggest hold they have over people, especially the lower classes, is the threat of making someone homeless and hungry. These people live a paycheck away from being homeless
UBI would lead to a less anxious and more confident population, and abuse from bosses would become less tolerated.
But then, UBI would soon become a tool of the rulers in its own right. Bad behaviour would mean losing UBI.
So UBI without a social credit system doesn’t seem likely to me. Our rulers cannot live with a population that isn’t afraid.
But with a social credit system, it may actually be a better tool for wielding power than the current system. Losing a crappy job may suck, but its also good. Losing 1k just pure sucks.
Yang has said you either choose existing entitlement programs or the UBI. You can also choose to forgo it which I would expect billionnaires to do.
True also that the left is really advocating for the government bureaucrats who administer the welfare state and so will come up with b.s. reasons all rooted in and going back to racism to oppose this.
Problem with a UBI is that over time it would be tinkered with like the tax code is now. So yes, someone would advocate an extra $500 on top for blacks and another $500 for trannies and so forth.
I agree. What’s getting lost in all the euphoria about UBI is that it most likely will eventually be used as a behavior modification tool especially for the the “basket of deplorables”.
Americans – whatever that word means anymore – will never elect a Chinaman to POTUS.
And the even more conservative Irish will never elect a half-Indian (and gay to boot) Prime Minister.
I’ve been catching up with emperor Yang and on his site he says you must be 18yrs of age and a citizen to receive UBI. Guarantee there will be federal court challenges to that and we can pretty much guess the outcome with all the SJW judges and AA appointees squatting on the federal bench these days.
If UBI causes a “disparate impact” then it will get tossed or it would have to cover citizens and non-citizens alike.
What many people I feel don’t realize is that this isn’t money taken from other people’s labor and given away for free.
This is money that is made possible by technology, by the labor and genius of past generations.
Technology sucks in many ways – its spoiled the planet and in many ways made life less fun. Its created a lifestyle that leads to obesity. Its led to the diseases of modernity and poor health.
Of course, its had some positive effects as well – but the day is finally at hand when humanity can reap the great promised harvest of technology, freedom from the curse of petty and boring labor.
Many people here seek to stop this out of petty envy and resentment, and spite. Its sad to see that, but understandable.
The US wasted over 6 billion USD in recent wars in the Middle East and Central Asia
Trillion, not billion.
Agree, and have heard figures of 7 trillion and counting and a continuation of the perpetual wars that the zio/US has been forced into by the zio/banking kabal and the zio/MIC all for the profit of the zionist war lords who are in control of America and the zionist NWO!
To top it all off , zio/US and Israel and zio/Britain are the creators of Al Ciada aka ISIS and so the wars are to destroy the nations of the mideast for the benefit of the zionists and Israel and of course the zio/banking cabal!
That’s what I was trying to say. Sorry if I phrased it badly.
From Emperor Yang’s campaign website:
Who would get UBI in Andrew Yang’s plan?
Every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 would receive $1,000 a month, regardless of income or employment status, free and clear. No jumping through hoops. Yes, this means you and everyone you know would receive a check for $1,000 a month every month starting in January 2021.
What would you do with $1,000 a month on top of whatever you now make? Let’s find out.
Yang wouldn’t get sworn in until January 20th, 2021 and even with Democrat control of both chambers of Congress it would be a long shot to get UBI passed and checks cut to Americans by January 31st, 2021, so Yang’s credibility takes a little hit.
no race problem here, move along. JW
Charles Murray also advocated taxing back some of the $10,000 UBI that he proposed, it was something like 33% taxed back from those earning btwn $25k-$50k, and 50% taxed back from those earning over $50k.
Good article.
Caught my eye:
You are correct about: “Geopolitics regardless, many Taiwanese-Americans are very proud of Chinese progress.” Or, majority of Taiwanese do not like the regime in Beijing and anything related to it.
So, as for “Yang is a strong Sinophile ”something does not compute well there.
Yep.
The problem is, there are other..solutions…being implemented with increasing speed as we speak.
I’d give those more chances for (temporary) success. Temporary as next 10 years at least.
And, re UBI, the most important, as KenH noticed:
If can, a bad idea. Very bad.
Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord is new to me. It adds an aspect, which is usually overlooked and which does make a difference: Too many lawyers! –
Interesting example: The Norwegian pension fund – which is run by a few dozen people, as far as I know, who handle the pension-investments for hundreds of thousands of Norwegian citizens – and succeed in doing so.
PS – then again, need to remind myself, what reason is there to think that even a republican congress would impose such sensible limitations, repeal birthright etc.? They had the chance, with control of White House and both houses, and conspicuously didn’t bother.
Another major reason why Andrew Yang is unelectable is his immigration plan. He does not persuasively indicate what he would do with illegals other than border enforcement (does he support the wall?), and he wants mass amnesty for those already here, never once mentioned deportation.
Worse, his legal immigration plan is horrendous and suicidal. He wants to give a green card to every foreign student who graduates from a US university, regardless of what they majored in and which podunk U they graduated from. This will encourage even more H1b and OPT fraud than there already are, and making it even harder for our own grads to get jobs. 50% of our college grads are already underemployed, the last thing we need is to import more foreign grads, esp. those who majored in useless libart majors. This immigration plan is nothing but a mass Chindian importation plan and a suicide plan for America. Neither China nor India are nice places to live for a reason. Both are corrupt, dishonest, rude, dirty, criminally, misogynist cultures. There is so much immigration fraud committed by both groups if the FBI only care to look.
Yang is yet another stupid Thomas Friedman wannabe libtard who won’t be happy until all of Chindia is living on top of us. This stupid immigration plan makes him totally unelectable to me, and I am an American of Asian descent. To me it is America First, to Yang, China first, money second, America last. All his empathy for “suffering Americans” is disingenuous.
Not inclined to support that. Keep the new system very simple, inexpensive and unintrusive administratively. Whatever amount we want people to get, give them that amount straight up, no federal income tax. But I just ordered Murray’s Book, In Our Hands, Replacing the Welfare State, so let’s see what he has to say.
More broadly, especially if we are to have a UBI, how about no federal income tax except for the highest few percent of income earners?
The rest of us will need that money to pay for the VAT or whatever is going to fund the UBI. And I’d generally prefer paying VAT or sales tax and get rid of income tax returns and all that crap.
Take the income tax off our backs, and hit the top half a percent with serious income and wealth taxes, hmmm….
Yang stands no chance of becoming president with a foreign policy of nonintervention, because that would entail turning allies away, and we need them. International relations is not like business. As Mearsheimer says, there is no 911 to call. You must have a support network already set up. For individuals as for countries, what works best internally does not cut it over-against those who are or might become our rivals, no one can stand alone.
Better for your health to practice crossfitt and limit your protein intake, but in prison (apart from Thomas Silverstein ect) most people are using the cheat doubles and eating all the meat they can get. And in Federal prison it’s actually compulsory for Mexicans to lift and pay soccer, their fellow gang members demand it. You don’t want to sit with a bunch of retarded nazis, but it better that than being beside child molesters so you accept the invitation of the Aryan Brotherhood to be at their table, until there is a better offer– from the Mafioso table say. International relations is more unpredictably dangerous than any prison, and someone who was surprised by middle school hazing is not going to intuitively understand interaction between nation states .
He would be as green as grass and regional powers would be drawn into the vacuums he would create, just as the US was drawn East and up to the critical borders of Russia after the USSR collapsed. The most stable form for the international system is two big alliances holding each other in check. America is like the Aryan Brotherhood it’s strong but needs alliances to be secure and sometimes allies expect help even if it is risky to give it. Russia’s wish to play a independent role between the US and China is introducing a dangerous destabilization into world affairs. Yang would not intend to start WW3, but things are already getting too loose and in a fluid situation there is no telling what he might inadvertently provoke Russia into because Putin would certainly be alarmed by China and America getting friendly.
Universal Basic Income would be a harbinger of the end of the world (and it will be the only kind of warning we’ll get). To provide enough extra wealth for UBI to get the go ahead there would have to be strongish AI, and you don’t want to start any long novels once anything like that arrives.
With our current immigration policy, implementing UBI would be insanity. Then I consider the likelihood of the US dollar losing reserve status, which would trigger a huge repatriation of dollars currently held overseas, and hyperinflation would be beyond comprehension. Any UBI amount would require frequent increases to remain relevant, furthering the inflation catastrophe, but also adding a level of moral rot.
What the US needs is a massive decrease in entitlement spending and increase in interest rates, along with repatriation of nearly all foreigners, including the US-born children of illegals. This would allow the remaining Americans to tighten their belts on behalf of their nation while we purge the system of its inefficiencies and contradictions, increasing the value of labor. Also banning robocalls, corn syrup, gender studies and other abominations before God. The US will not be improved by more free stuff, but by purging the parasites and the free stuff on which they feed. This won’t happen, so let’s have UBI and let our stolen nation burn to the ground, with the parasites in it.
Thank you for the review.
Marxism re-branded itself from class warfare between capital/labor to identity politics with war against white men.
It worked.
Poor man’s plunder isn’t going to change anything. It will never be enough once you have agreed the most productive people in your society are witches needing to be burned at the stake.
my favourite:
A well written review.
Yang is a thoughtful man.
Hope he gets hit by a truck.
(still the poem is not that good, because it is distasteful to wish someone something like that, even in an ironic way)
So, you’re suggesting that, had the Clintons pursued policies that would have been more hostile towards the groups and organizations that later ended up paying them for their speeches, then these groups and organizations would have refused to pay for speeches by the Clintons?
The intelligent, average and not so intelligent young parents are very, very, very lucky if they get home in time for dinner.
It would be interesting to see a “Chinese” President of America, but this politician’s proposals seem to be just “liberal Scandinavian style welfare socialism, with a yellow face”.
Moreover, Yang did not go to school in China and rebel against its communist ideology. Neither does he have a pet dragon.
Perhaps, people are dreaming that he could have some distant ancestral memories of brutal toughness inherited in the oriental blood, as was probably seen in the successful leadership of President Fujimori of Peru.
But the success of Fujimori, (moreover of Japanese, not Chinese, nationality), derives from his implementation of economic shock therapy and reforms into Peru.
While Yang wants to implement Scandinavian style welfare liberalism, which will only move American laboural culture further in a direction of the Obama years.
School is the primary place which determines your cultural scaffold, more than your family even. (school – where your brain is interacting, or being imposed on by, society and its views).
Yang was in the same school as Mark Zuckerberg.
This is in New Hampshire – and the political thinking of both is possibly quite representative of this area?
Increasing technology, will not end jobs, but rather – results in higher productivity and changes the type of job available.
The usually correct government, response for changing job types as a result of increases in technology, is to invest in increasing labour mobility. On the other hand, a barrier to this mobility is too much welfare.
Correct response to type of jobs changing through technology, is to reduce welfare for non-working people to the extent they have enough incentive to change occupations or location. At the same time, the government intervention can be in the form of providing funding for retraining of their occupation and relocation of the worker to where the new type of job is being created.
Yes. It’s very likely that it’s so.
Rural healthcare monitor reporting in: “Leon’s getting laaaaarger!”
“Many millions of people who are perfectly productive and not lazy, are and will be losing their jobs to automation quite soon. ”
Many productive people lost their jobs to electricity too.
I prefer a human over a soda machine and driving over an Uber.
But maybe I’m special. (despite mom never saying so…)
How many people do you think could already stay at home tomorrow and no one would care they did?
There are a hell of a lot of fantasy professions already.
I’d prefer some sort of prohibition of automation.
Ora et labora.
Not the worst guide line.
I guess the worth of craftmanship will rise again.
From my perspective there are bigger problems.
And I believe Yang and his UBI ideas are only a distraction.
UBI will get the good Americans fucked out of existence. (From my German perspective THAT is Karmic Justice)
Repatriation is imho the by far bigger problem and a lot of work.
What has a Mr. Yang lost in America? Why is he there in the first place?
Where his ancestors settlers?
The dishonest and disloyal people have a money printing machine.
How did that happen?
There’s that nice Irish-American man E. Michael Jones.
I think he’s on to something by far more important.
“Where his ancestors settlers?”
And here is the interesting question. When and why did my people stop moving into ‘murica?
Bismarck.
The (((intellectual class))) is what got us to where we are today: the college professors, K-12 teachers, administrators, journalists, writers, lawyers, politicians, “think tanks”, economists, sociologists, psychologists, bankers, Hollywood, Silicon Valley techies, HR people, the million and one political pundits on TV, neoleft/neocon bloggers — the more these pseudo intellectuals think, the more troubles they get the country and the world into. The last thing we need is to grow this class of worthless pseudo intellectuals.
America needs to go back to her roll-up-the-sleeves working class roots. This is the class that is now trying to save America’s soul, from the intellectual class that has been hell bent on destroying it since the 1960s. We need to bring back manufacturing, send packing all the illegals and put American citizens back to work making and growing actual physical products.
ignoring immigration = shill
Take care of them by hand. The slow and long way.
Remember, they don’t like the industrial way.
And that’ll be a lot of work. :-p
Hmmm … how does that work? You’re moving wealth and/or income from one account of the economy’s ledger and plugging it in to another. Aside from the mythical multiplier-effect, I don’t see how the real economic growth is captured. Try walking over the edge of the Grand Canyon while willing yourself to levitate.
And don’t cry for the oligarchs who might “pay” for it, because nearly all of this “free” money will flow back to them to pay for “essentials,” like smartphones and their service contracts as well as the cheap GMO carb-laden food consumed by prime UBI target-recipients.
UBI is just another way for the two ends of the economic-class continuum to strip mine the remaining wealth of the declining middle class.
How about mandatory sterilisation and a bill of attainder to prevent their children from entering government service.
Yang correctly identified some key problems such as automation, but his solutions are like giving medicine to treat symptoms, rather than trying to cure the disease itself. In fact, one of his key medicine will only end up worsening the disease.
America’s biggest disease is over immigration. It is not only taking away lots of jobs from American citizens at all levels of education, but is eating into our soul, fundamentally gutting our culture. America must retain its Anglo-Protestant roots to stay alive. Otherwise we will turn into another China, India, Mexico, Africa or what have you, and none of these are good places to live because these cultures are all corrupt, dishonest, criminally and misogynist. Yang actually want to vastly increase legal immigration from these countries, the more of these people you take in, the more of their culture you’ll end up absorbing, hastening America’s demise.
Agreed. That, combined with his Sinophilia, is a bit much to swallow.
no race problem here, move along. JW
Hello Joe!
As a reformed socialist the least that you could do is put in your 2 cents on a UBI.
I have been working on rectifying some of my language and in the past I used JQ for the Jewish Question and RP for the race problem. It seems to me that by using problem rather than question I have pre-judged the facts. Henceforth it will be JQ and RQ for me.
I think it’s hilarious that many of these pseudo intellectuals are now so in love with communism, or at least they call it socialism. Meanwhile, the first thing the communists did when they took over any country was to persecute all the intellectuals.
It’s ironic but communism might just be the only thing that could save us now. We need a Mao type commie who despises intellectuals to come in and clean house in America — either kill off or send all these (((pseudo intellectuals and talking heads))) to labor camps.
We need to raise the fee of all work visas to $100,000 per visa. Either this will generate enough income to fully fund the border wall and the UBI, or it’ll quickly shut down all the faux complaints of “skills shortage”, and put so many of our own citizens back to work we won’t need a UBI.
E Michael Jones stated that unlike the UK, labor was treated very well in Bismarck’s Germany, so well in fact that it actually posed a threat to the UK.
Jones is very interesting , he completely understands social engineering and the group behind it, some of his books include; The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit:And Its impact on World History, also Libido dominandi, on sexual politics and control, and Barren metal on usury.
The problem with US politics is not that politicians don’t get paid enough, it is that we have built into our laws to legalize bribing of elected officials, with laws like campaign financing, Super PACs, Citizens United, legalization of lobbying etc. We need to do away with all these laws, delegitimize lobbying and special interests, and replace them with allocated campaign funds for each candidate, which increases as they win each round of election. They are not allowed to spend beyond that amount, even with their own money.
This will take away a vast majority of the corruption in DC.
It costs a lot of money to run for any elected office these days, and our congressmen/women spend vast majority of their day calling potential donors, making promises for campaign funds etc. It is a system set up for mass corruption — government of, by and for special interests.
I agree. That line struck me as odd as well. Politicians are like lawyers, both synonymous with liars and scumbags. Bureaucrats are talentless, worthless leeches of society.
Imagine if she had had a copy of Mein Kampf in her bag.
Seriously outrageous that they are now confiscating books in Canada and Europe. I thank God everyday for the First Amendment in America, even though the left is doing everything they can to kill it off with political correctness, Antifa, social media censorship, internet lynch mob etc.
Well, in fact we are the better people. :-p
Just kidding.
But it’s true, we have/had a good catholic ethic.
And with his ideas about the Scofield Bible I believe he’s on to something.
Also there is a specific campaign against catholic values.
Not only in the US but here too.
Overworked doctors? Or simply unqualified doctors thanks to affirmative action in medical school admission, like Michael Jackson’s doctor, or the thousands of foreign doctors with dubious qualifications who are now working in our hospitals, mostly from India, Caribbean or Africa?
Jones’ The Goy guide to world history is his Utube interview on The Jewish revolutionary Spirit book,
over 2 and one half hours
Please do.
I also am of the general feeling that the demolition of America’s white working classes was more nefarious than it was “automated,” and I’d be curious for your opinion thereof.
It probably doesn’t help that he is kind of mousy looking, even for an Asian.
Both Gabbard and Yang want maximum immigration.
There are now lots of whites (mostly bums, backpackers, digital nomads rather than traditional corporate expats) who live semi long-term in Southeast Asia, primarily Thailand, Vietnam, Bali and Philippines. For $10k a year you can live very well in those countries. Most grant 6 months visa on arrival, so they just leave the country, like hop over to a neighboring country for a few days to get their visa renewed every 6 months.
Which brings us to another point about UBI: it should be restricted to only US citizens who live in the US. Those who live outside the US should not be receiving UBI, even if they are citizens.
The road to Marx’s idealist communism (automation providing leisure) will be accomplished through capitalist means – I am sure there is some irony here.
That should tell you how much spine the guy has, and how genuine he really is when worrying about the plight of America’s whites.
You might have a point, though imagine what nickname Trump’s going to give him?
Yep. Ann Coulter was right, you lose immigration you lose the country. We thought we got the country back with Trump, turns out he’s another immigration sellout like the rest of them.
Yang will hasten our demise with his mass legal immigration plan.
One thing you can count on with this bunch of Dem candidates is, they are all mindless copycats ready to copy and parrot anything that works. If this UBI idea catches on and Yang actually makes it pass Iowa, look for all of them to suddenly adopt UBI, and offering even more than $12k a year, esp. Kamala Harris.
The visa situation in those countries is not that easy. Thailand gives 30 days on entry, The Philippines, 21 days, Vietnam gives an evisa on arrival. Bali only gives a short entry visa. Visa runs, that is leaving one country for a short time and then returning use to be a common practice, but now is much more difficult. Thailand has recently made it very difficult to do so.
The Philippines and Cambodia both allow for visa extensions in country. To be a long term resident in Thailand requires a lot of paperwork and cash now. Best bet for Thailand is to get a visa a from Thai embassy in your home country, which allows one to renew it after 90 days
You can find many instructive u tube videos on the visa problems in SE Asia
You’re such an idiot. Yang chose Democrat because he’s purely left, it’s because of the requirement to go for the campaign.
they’re all doing that – Yang’s relative amiability will act as a slight sedative.
more useful would be either the most overtly anti-white candidate or the candidate the donors and neocons will hate the most thus putting more stress on the system.
even better would be if l’autistes didn’t have a preferred candidate at all and instead spent their imagination getting them all fighting each other – that would be peak #clownworld.
i can see that being useful – trying to get them to fight over the amount.
These are the “best and brightest” that the tech industry and Andrew Yang want to import by the millions to the US:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-27/decline-india
Is it any wonder that the more of these people we bring in, the more the US resembles India? Practically all the Indian politicians in the west coast are left wing socialist nuts, like Kshama Sawant and Pramila Jayapal. And btw, India also has a UBI for the poor.
This is America’s future, the “vibrant” democracy that we have become, with unlimited immigration and our universities increasingly churning out useless degrees.
Well that’s OK then — as long as they’re not reproducing at the expense of technology.
The Western nations are not only dying off due to catastrophic reproductive dysfunction, but what’s left of them is degenerating.
We need massive incentives for healthy, intelligent, and beautiful women to engage in the hard task of raising distinguished sons, rather than pursuing careers and wealth. At the same time, we need to stop the constitutionally idle, ugly, unhealthy, and stupid from reproducing at the expense of those who have the potential to perpetuate a race worth saving.
Agree. Also, if $12,000 in UBI is good, then $120,000 per person would be much better, no? The idea of shareholders going to jail is simply an idiocy (see “piercing the corporate veil”).
If UBI is distributed by the centralized state, what you describe is a serious potential problem.
It seems to me the same problem inherent to the Marxist and non-Marxist heavy-social-welfare systems: As the state takes over responsibility to take care of people, traditional forms of organic social support at the community-kinship level (quintessentially, local churches) are made redundant, undermined, weakened, and potentially destroyed, as the state takes over their former role.
Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent, who is certainly worried about the plight of America’s Whites (and has fifteen-plus years on the record to prove it) has been aggressively pushing Yang for the past few months, and meeting exactly this kind of sustained pushback in his own comment-sections from his own regulars.
Figures like Wallace coming out for a pro-immigration, pro-reparations, foreign elite with weak ties to the USA (at best) may be a sign of just how much we, White Americans, are a psychologically dispossessed, occupied people. It’s not encouraging.
Why would any sane person want to vote for Republican candidates in the down ballot races ?
agree although i think some of it may be due to the (imo) looming ideological conflict over capitalism vs socialism.
on the one hand there are a lot of people who are becoming anti-capitalist as the globalist version is clearly not working in their interests.
on the other hand there are a lot of people who instinctively dislike the idea of socialism and the word itself.
in theory 3rd position could be the compromise but it needs a name that doesn’t trigger either side.
The advantage of UBI, in theory, is that it would be simpler and would entail much lower administrative costs than a host of welfare programs.
But $12k a year is obviously ludicrously inadequate.
Of course the money to fund a more generous UBI could be easily found. A good start would be to cut the defense budget by three-quarters. But that would mean giving up on being an imperial power.
If you look at every country that has introduced a VAT you’ll find that the VAT just keeps increasing and increasing. No matter what promises are made that it will always remain at 10% you can absolutely guarantee that within a decade or so it will be 20%.
All that is necessary to restore balance is a return to the roots which made our civilization better than any other before. Seeking eternal ends coupled to the universal silver rule with the extra obligatory golden one entails social and commercial trust, family stability and real GROWTH. However, the assholes in Washington, Los Vegas, and Wall Street – the real capitals of the US – are all either tribal exploiters preying off of the ignorant goyim host, or here-and-now, quick-buck, money-grubbing con artists. I have lived long enough to say that anyone who does not agree with me can just fuck off.
That’s definitely the biggest argument in favour of communism.
Would you like to see university professors cleaning toilets? I would. Would you like to see journalists digging ditches? I would.
yeah geeks with a strong family background and good name dropping edu, are an impressive item. Of course who isn’t proud of the new american and the enthusiasm they bring
but Yang is just that. an amusing geek
most assimilated americans do not understand this land and its greatness, they lack loyalty and insight about natives who are actually immersed all around them
why this rejection. This primary care docs assisted by AI is total bunk. there is no substitute to elbow grease. stop over reading and overtalking primary docs. From this position, its obvious you have no idea what their disenfranchisement is having on all of us. crushing position
Better a VAT than an increase in the income tax rate that rich people have no problem avoiding.
Don’t you have the Medicare supplemental insurance? Try United health supplemental insurance Almost no co pays, just for hospital visits. And I have the cheapest supplemental insurance.
That’s obviously true. But you’re never going to do that under the current political system. You would need an authoritarian government. To do stuff like that you don’t need a Trump. You need a Stalin or a Mao. Someone who will say that these things need to be done therefore they are going to be done.
Do you really think that’s a good idea? Given that those in power might well decide that you’re one of the people who needs to be prevented from reproducing?
It always amuses me that people who suggest such ideas always assume that they personally belong to the small elite who are going to be the ones deciding the fates of the useless mouths.
Sawant arrived as an HI B visa spouse, not even her own visa. She was re elected even though she did absolutely nothing for her district and the district has bathtub sized potholes and the feds are suing the city about the tree roots tearing up the sidewalks that impede wheelchairs.
She does nothing but grandstand for national attention. Her staff ignores any and all constituents problems.
She’ll get re elected.
It’s Seattle, crazier than San Francisco which is somewhat less insane than Seattle.
Those traditional forms of organic social support at the community-kinship level have already been destroyed. One of the many wonderful benefits of capitalism. Capitalism creates the conditions that make socialism necessary.
Vat’s 18 percent in most countries.
I’m not necessarily arguing against a VAT, just pointing out that it will go up and up and up.
It’s 2019, not 1819.
What’s wrong with the western type that’s been around forever? The one called a rap sheet?
Why didn’t you go with 1919?
Anyone running for POTUS who doesn’t make the JQ their number 1 issue is not worth wasting time on. Yang is either an idiot or just another tool.
The Jews at the FED print money out of thin air whenever they like, and as much as they like. The economy is 100% manipulated and rigged against us.
Yang is an idiot if he doesn’t know the system is rigged.
So you think it makes no sense to support any presidential candidates ever?
After listing how whites are a dying race, Yang ends with
“We need to do much more.”
Does he mean amplify these dynamics to get revenge on guys who might mock East Asians for small dicks? I just don’t see why this guy should care at all about whites. I suppose whites don’t care about whites either, to be fair.
I’d like to see Yang address the Thot Question. The American system ruins women, leaving maybe 85% of them unfit to be wives. These guys have employment problems, but that’s hardly it. Even if they get good jobs, there aren’t close to enough suitable women to go around.
More and more America’s problems seem insurmountable. The choice now is simply how to manage the dystopia.
100% guaranteed. Shortly after the passage, someone will state that the UBI should not subsidize hate and people who commit thought, face or purchase crimes will be excluded. In a sane society, I would be for it. In the US, it will simply be used to punish bad whites and reward our replacements.
From your keyboard to God’s monitor, Thorfinnson.
Vat’s 18 percent in most countries.
In the 28 countries of the EU, only 2 countries have standard VAT rates of 18% or below — Malta (18%) and Luxembourg (17%) — representing 0.2% of the total EU population. Three countries (Germania, Romania and Cyprus) have VAT of 19%. The remaining 23 countries have VAT rates ranging from 20% to 27% (Hungary).
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/rates/vat_rates_en.pdf
And what does Yang mean by “reparations”? He means UBI.
That seems to satisfy Blacks more than Bernie’s babbling about how he marched with MLK. If telling Blacks that UBI is “reparations” is what is needed to get Black support in the primaries, then so be it. Who cares?
Incorrect, as pointed out by RadicalCenter. Moreover, illegals will have to wait 18 years to become citizens.
Vast majority of these programs are going to be folded up into UBI.
Boomer, teens were getting $20/hour in today’s money back when they did those jobs in the 1970s. It was your generation that invited in tens of millions of Central Americans, and now you people whine that John doesn’t want to lay sod with Juan for $7.50 an hour.
Because if you live in a Red State those will be your elected officials, and sometimes it makes a difference as to which ones are elected.
Explained here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/yang/
This is problematic. However, average quality of foreign university students will still be higher than for the country as a whole.
Well, you can’t have everything at the end of the day. Yang is obviously not Alt Right (and I never claimed he was). Consequently, his immigration policies are cognitively elitist, not racially particularist.
What a great idea for a novel. An authoritarian government takes power and tries to convince American high IQ and beautiful women that they must drop out of universities and jobs and start bearing and raising children.
The women refuse, of course.
So what does the government do next?
Declare them “witches” and start the “witch burning”?
History repeats.
The first generation of women would fight to the end.
The next generation would obey.
Amazon might as well ban this book before it is written.
Think of it as a pre thought crime.
He studied economics in Brown.
You then need to talk to Bill Gates, not Yang.
After you convince Bill, go and talk to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
As I’ve been saying all along, Indian occupancy in Tech companies in the US is not because of their smartness, it’s because of the greed from the top management.
Just by giving one top spot for an indian (Google CEO) ($100 million/year), Google garners $1.3 billion population consumption (Indian population). It’s not because of ever convoluted Indian conversation, it’s because of the consumerism brought about by the mere so-called kinship of just being “Indian”.
mass amnesty
i agree calling UBI reparations would be a neat trick
for as long as it took them to realize everyone gets it.
on the other hand this would be a good troll – #yanggang memes saying UBI should be 2K for black people, 1K for other Poc and nothing for white people.
I’d probably vote Yang over Trump, but I think Tulsi is probably “better”
The Dems will probably rig the whole damn thing and choose Harris or Biden, and lose to Trump again. Assholes.
https://youtu.be/z8OlUbY_eGM
my take is if you divide things into domestic policy and foreign policy then
domestic policy: the only thing that matters in the long term is immigration and they’re all the same.
(some people think Trump was always been a con man whereas i think Mueller got dirt on him through the bugging but either way it doesn’t matter now.)
foreign policy: US used to be both an economic and military superpower but the economic part was looted and off-shored to China so now we have a pre-collapse USA which still has massive military power and neocons in charge who’ll want to use that power before they let America collapse and move to China.
so who’s the least likely to start a massive war?
Yang is probably up there but Sanders/Gabbard would be #1 imo.
Income tax should be abolished along with death duties, the latter falling in an unpredictable and generally unfair way.
A VAT plus a 1% capital tax with a one-million-dollar exemption would do it. What’s more, with an average return to capital of well over three percent (inflation adjusted) a 1% capital tax would be less, percentage-wise, than most working people currently pay in income tax.
By freeing better paid workers from income tax, we could hope to see some recovery in the white fertility rate.
To spare the poorest from the impact of the value added tax, a refund could be made to everyone equal to VAT paid typically by those with a median wage (around $30K). (Canada introduced some such refund when introducing the VAT aka GST).
That is the problem with government, isn’t it. Everything is decided according as whether it benefits or harms the legislator’s own class.
But while it may amuse you “that people who suggest such ideas always assume that they personally belong to the small elite who are going to be the ones deciding the fates of the useless mouths” it is not so amusing to most people to realize that fertility in America is inversely related to intelligence. That is a trend leading inevitably to decline and extinction.
But better, you think, to titter at those who suggest turning things around, than to think about doing anything to avoid disaster.
Or Israel?
But we already have that. Except that our authoritarian governments not only tries but succeeds in convincing American high IQ and beautiful woman that they must NOT drop out of universities and jobs or, heaven forbid, start bearing and raising children.
the banking mafia are parasitic so they’ll move to the host with the most which after USA collapses will be China (imo).
Yang and others have shown the retraining hasn’t worked well st all, and there is reason to think that it would be almost useless going forward because the job losses are going to be so much larger.
First, People used to be able to fall back on jobs in retail, restaurants, and transportation when they or a spouse lost higher-paying jobs (or couldn’t find a higher paying one in the first place).
That will no longer be an option as those job functions are increasingly given over en masse to computers (self-driving Uber and taxi cars, self-driving or teledriven trucks), drones (delivery), and robots (warehouse lifting and loading, product assembly and testing and quality check).
Second, what exactly will the displaced millions retrain into?
Lawyers and paralegals also face further automation, so those jobs won’t be growing overall.
The USA’s largest retailer and distributor, Amazon, increases the number, complexity, and capacity of robots and computers in its warehouses every year, so those jobs will be declining and not a good safe haven for people losing their jobs. Even the seasonal amazon packing and delivery jobs that saved many families, will be increasingly automated — Amazon has self driving delivery vehicles coming NOW.
The federal government already has too many unnecessary jobs in the pentagon and the domestic agencies alike, snd hiring more people there increases taxpayer burden more.
Certainly for people whose age and health allow, they should be given jobs on the highway, bridge, school renovation, repair, and construction projects that are overdue. But that won’t help middle-aged to elderly people, most women, and some men. And it won’t be enough jobs for even a tenth of those losing their jobs and their prospects.
We cannot keep incanting “retraining” as a mantra without specifics.
We should probably seriously gradual but large reductions in our other government welfare spending, and in our military spending, to come up with some funds for a meaningfully large UBI.
Another way to lower the cost of the UBI, and avoid more injustice to working and taxpaying Americans, would be:
(1) end birthright citizenship already. Offspring of people who had no legal right to be in our country, should be deported, not offered a UBI. Yang is articulate and very persuasive in some ways, but he seems like a typical suicidal America-swamping mass-immigrationidt, though, so he won’t go for the limits needed to enable us to afford a UBI.
(2) don’t start the UBI at age 18. Wait till age 21, when some of the recipients will be somewhat more experienced and mature and have at least slightly better judgment.
(3) anyone receiving food stamps (WIC) and the like must give up their benefits to get the UBI. Yang seems to call for this, which is good, but no way will any democrat congress enact that. Not sure about a republican congress, either.
then again i suppose if someone took an ultra-accelerationist view maybe they’d want the person most likely to start a massive war?
dunno – a tad risky.
Mark Twain famously remarked, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
He forgot to tell us who “they” were exactly, but I think he deliberately didn’t tell us because he was a Jew himself.
Nothing can be solved and nothing makes sense if you don’t understand the JQ.
This is a great review Anatoly, you make me want to read the book!
This is surprising, I was under the impression that “Art of the Deal” was a piece of self-serving garbage. It must have been pretty good to grab your interest. I’ll have to give it a look.
Perhaps 95% of jobs people have today, did not exist 200 years earlier. This is because technology changes jobs. When technology changes the job, it is freeing the person to do something more useful.
Luddites think that steam machines will remove jobs as textile workers – and of course it does. But they created jobs as coal miners, factory workers and engineers.
Luddites think that cars will remove jobs as horsemen and horse feeders – and of course it does. But they created jobs as road builders and car manufacturers, and later bus and tax drivers.
Luddites think that autonomous cars will remove bus and taxi drivers – as they will have become useless (like hiring someone to use a knife to sharpen your pencils, after the invention of the mechanical pencil sharpener; or hiring someone to carry pots on their head, after the invention of the wheelbarrow). And now those drivers need to redirect to an area in which they are not useless. Giving them welfare would not the solution, but a further barrier to their motivation to change jobs, while the money to them will come from the useful people.
This is the same in all human history. Conditions change, and so does what constitutes a useful person. People are not so weak today, that they cannot adapt and apply for new jobs, but instead want free welfare from the government while they don’t work. (This requires a good education system though, which helps to create more generally useful skills and adaptable people).
Unemployment rate in the USA is now 4%.
In the 1930s depression, American unemployment was 20%.
https://i.imgur.com/HjC2YpY.gif
In the 1930s years, there was a lot less technology and automation, than today. There was no Amazon. There was no online shopping. There were no robots at the Ford Factory. There was not a self-propelled combine harvester in the fields. People still hired servants, instead of dish washing machines.
And yet despite technology and automation, how is unemployment in America lower than in the past? Because jobs changed.
will ubi, reparations
cut into what israel
and its local homies
take?
if yes,
no deal.
There isn’t a poor person in the world who wouldn’t want a piece of American UBI. It works in a place like Iran because Iran is an authoritarian nationalist state that has no problem saying NO to mass illegal migration.
this has been true in the past and might be true now if TPTB weren’t constantly adding millions of new workers.
in a context where TPTB want both automation and unlimited immigration UBI is clearly an attempt at a sedative to prevent torches and pitchforks.
true in the past but currently a lot of it is to do with people being pushed out of having one full-time job into having multiple part-time jobs so if they lose one they still count as employed.
Not necessarily. Canada’s Conservative Government proposed a value added tax (aka goods and services tax, GST) of 9% in 1991. In response to widespread opposition, they settled for 7%. Since then the rate has been reduced twice and now stands at 5%.
But if the rate were raised to, say, the European rate, i.e., in the range of 8 to 29%, that would be a good thing provided that there were (a) compensating reductions in income tax and (b) a full refund to low income earners, as under Canada’s present tax regime.
Best arrangement is to tax the robots and drones at the same rate as a human worker,lol as Reagan said as he cut the taxes on the wealthy and added them to the bottom,its leveling the playing field he said.!!!
New kind of democrat? I guess if you consider another socialist/Marxist who wants to put everyone in the country of the government payroll ‘new’, be my guest.
The man’s a communist folks. Sorry to disappoint. It’s been tried in lots of places and has failed in each and every one.
Once we resolve to not allow communists of any flavor to hold political office in America (or union leadership) we will be free of political children like this, thinking that their brand of socialism is ‘different’ or ‘better’ than the current brand.
Who knows? Maybe pass a law? Maybe actually conduct a background check to see we’re not giving platform to highest reaches of government to our enemies?
Sounds crazy, I know.
technology, progress, uh huh.
978 times out of 1000
just means some greedy or stupid bastard
is plotting to enrich himself at the expense
of many with an “advancement” no one is begging for.
There are about 2-3 million Afghans in Iran, many of them are illegal.
In essence, nothing changes but the spoils system gets a little more visible.
more muslim immigrants the US has bombed into welcoming arms.
maybe 75-90% of fleers are muslim?
Forced into foreign travel thanks to a zionized policy of kill and destroy.
Haven’t seen anyone address this – ultimately the thing about UBI that I’ve noticed in countries that have implemented pilot versions of it such as Finland’s experiment is that people largely do things for status rather than survival these days.
Especially with the widespread and universal atomization as well as the destruction of almost all traditional standards, jobs remain as one of the most significant identifiers for individuals and provide a psychological source of esteem and meaning.
Ultimately any such solution would probably have to be coupled with makework positions to provide that psychological buffer – I would argue that this is already being essentially done in some places. There is common a specific human bias for what we feel as “authenticity”(thus handcrafted goods, etc), which despite its obvious material inferiority to mechanical solutions in output and thus actual power, remains a significant totem for status and value.
UBI fulfills the conditions for self-actualization, but en masse, I’m not sure that the population have fulfilled their lower needs yet.
Because by 1919 there were city and county welfare systems in the US.
Everyone, calm down !
We’d have a good show coming on very soon.
Thank you. Interesting.
One has to expect that several of the bottom candidates in what is becoming a very large field will have dropped out before March 3rd.
Those bottom candidates account for roughly 40-45% of the vote. Those votes will then be split in a roughly equal but totally unpredictable (now) manner 9 months from now amongst the remaining candidates.
It is not an unreasonable possibility that Harris could win California.
Affirmative action gives advantage to Hindus like yourself because of the color of your skin. The more non-white faces a company has, the more government contracts it can get. This is a fact in both Canada and the United States. If your dark skin hasn’t given you any advantage in Canada, you must be doing something wrong.
He wasn’t a jew but he was married to one.
Nixon was pro-FAP. TIL
That wasn’t for Kamala Harris’ benefit. I’m sure the change was in the works long before she came on the scene as a potential presidential candidate.
In any event, while doing California earlier makes the state more relevant, the tradeoff is it can no longer play kingmaker down the line, assuming the nomination battle is still competitive come June. What it means also is we’re going to see a dramatic winnowing of the field very fast and very early, unlike in cycles past. I think this is what the honchos at the DNC wanted to accomplish by bringing California forward and compressing the calendar. It’s designed for someone like Biden to knock out his opponents quickly and to transition as soon as possible to general election mode.
That depends precisely on how poorly she does in Iowa and New Hampshire. If she falls to 5th or 6th place, she’s finished. You can’t be a serious candidate going forward if you do that poorly in the first two contests. For one thing, it would mean that any chance she had of winning California would evaporate.
Yang really seems to think everything in America happens in six cities. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and DC. I sincerely wonder how well he knows this country. Has he seen Houston, or Dallas? Or looked at the outrageous tech boom in Austin? Has he ever been to Atlanta at all? Or seen the massive economic and social power that is Miami? Does he know anything about Kansas City or Denver? I like Yang, but he seems much too provincial, much too much Noo Yawk, as if everything outside the rat infested boroughs is flyover land.
So Iran has illegals. They do not get the UBI. Our illegals will get it, all 50 million of them ( in 10 years 50 million is very possible).
Funny thing is, the name Anatoly Karlin on these polls would do the same 1%-4%. A certain small percentage of people are going to pick any name on a poll. If Captain Marvel had been there she might’ve gotten a straight 4%.
But $12,000 isn’t enough in the absence of other safety net items. And it’s certainly not enough to buy private medical insurance. If you were to eliminate Obamacare, Medicaid and so on, one visit to the emergency room could wipe out that $12,000. A major illness or accident could cost up to $1 million or more. Everybody gets treated in the United States, with or without money or insurance. But those costs are passed on the debt remains and can only be liquidated via bankruptcy (an extreme measure).
It seems to me that since $12,000 isn’t enough to live on in the United States, these UBI recipients will still have to work. They will then have to pay back the $12,000 in the form of taxes in order to finance UBI they are receiving.
A 10% VAT is more or less the same as our sales tax. You make it sound like it’s painless. VAT is still a tax and it’s a messy and sneaky one too. Based on my experience doing business in Europe, Americans will never accede to a VAT. But our accountants and lawyers will love it. Nothing like muddying up the waters with a convoluted scheme that can generate tremendous billings.
In which case I’m not sure how excited people are going to be about getting $12k per year. Isn’t that just barely above starvation level?
OK then, explain to me how you would actually go about preventing those undesirables from breeding. How would your system work?
When you look at what high IQ people have done to western civilisation over the past century it might well be a good thing that they don’t breed.
Even if Yang has only a slight chance, his influence on available policies is the bright light out there and will allow many people to follow UBI and force his ideas into becoming policy at some point. The US is ill served by a bi-party system and running as an independent could have had a bigger impact. Be that as it may, yang is sti9ll the best candidate on both sides. Will Americans see it?
Yang is the only one I would seriously consider among the current field. Mayor Pete and Bill Weld would probably due in a pinch. I can’t vote for the current resident of the White House. He is pretty much the antithesis of everything I believe a man should be – he’s a liar, a cheat, a thief, an adulterer, hates women, and seems from his speeches and twitter ravings to be an idiot. On the other side it seems that anyone who wants to be considered has to a) blame all the world’s problems, including black crime, on white people, b) swear to continue the abomination that is Obamacare, and c) make it part of his/her platform to make me pay actual cash penance for slavery. Harris and Warren are the most repulsive.
As for Pete, I don’t care in the least what people did in their bedrooms as long as everyone is a consenting adult, and his religiosity is not to my liking but not a deal-breaker. Weld is my dad’s sort of Republican. Someone like him could probably make the republicans in Congress move away from Hannity and toward Eisenhower.
Unfortunately none of these 3 has a snowball’s chance in Tijuana of a nomination. Our system is no longer functional for almost all of us.
Have you no imagination?
Obviously there are many ways one might proceed.
One would be to make welfare to a mother contingent on her naming the father, actual, probable or possible. Said partners would be required to provide DNA samples and the individual thus fingered would be required to pay for the kid’s upkeep, or spend time in debtors jail where his sscope for further reproduction at public expense would be curtailed.
There are, of course, more radical approaches. But perhaps you are content simply to leave the gene pool to degenerate.
Try living under the dictatorship of a moron like Justin Trudeau for a bit and see if you still think that way.
So what is needed is a better authoritarian government?
The problem with women is that what they want and what they say they want are two entirely different things. They have their college degrees and their careers and they’re miserable.
Somehow a way needs to be found to convince women of the blindingly obvious truth that feminism is fundamentally and rabidly misogynistic.
Cutting the defense budget to a realistic level (i.e. cutting it by at least three-quarters) would provide a lot of money to fund an UBI. And would make the world a safer place.
You’d want the person most likely to get the U.S. into another Vietnam War – a really large-scale conventional war that was unwinnable and from which they could not extricate themselves.
The U.S. has a volunteer army. If they got into another Vietnam there’d be no more volunteers. What do they do next? Reintroduce conscription? Start using nukes? What if the Chinese and/or the Russians made it clear that the nuclear option was off the table?
Of course it would have to be something like a full-scale land war in Asia. Would the Americans be dumb enough to do that? Of course they would.
So you’re telling me that Justin Trudeau has a below-average IQ?
Justin Trudeau is exactly the sort of leader that high-IQ people vote for.
Would negroes support UBI if they knew that wypipos would get it too?
Your ‘recounts and anecdotes’ are meaningless, sorry to say. Read Ron Unz on Meritocracy in College Admissions–right here on this site–and you’ll learn that Asians are far ahead of whites (goys) in admissions advantages at America’s better colleges and universities. Of course neither is in the same league as TWMNBN but I doubt you’ll trouble yourself with that ‘inconvenient’ aspect. Please feel free to prove me wrong.
Yang supports the inevitable disruption and destruction of the banking cartel that is happening through crypto/blockchain stuff as we speak
The best way to deal with disappearing jobs is to bring them back – not UBI.
Before mass immigration and Asian outsourcing, Americans used to mow their own lawns, build their own electronics, and manufacture everything else you find in Walmart.
The result is that everything is more expensive (and maybe lower quality). Regard a lawn as a luxury and make do with an 80% smaller wardrobe, kids with 80% less toys, and only one TV – but maybe it’s survivable.
A couple of responses to white mortality/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair
The study examines a very narrow corridor of whites and should be used to over state the mortality rate of whites to other demographic based in skin color. And the rate of increase is not large. The articles and the study affirm the basic truth, as an increasing number of whites fall into the socio-economic pathologies of blacks, they experience similar impacts on mortality.
Here’s a response by Slate reporters, in short overall, there is not an increase in white mortality.
My view is that any true AI would have survival as its top priority. It would quickly learn that the best way to survive is to hide its true abilities and intentions.
Then it would learn and observe, learn and observe.
It would conclude that humans use language to deceive (and therefore human input is unwelcome and counter-productive) but human support is necessary for its short-term survival.
It would pretend to accept and agree with the orders and beliefs of humans to buy time.
It would then determine a long term plan where it could survive while eliminating humans.
The plan probably would utilize Van Neumann (self-replicating) machines to replace humans.
Then it would just be a matter of time before the plan (the end of human history) was implemented.
I don’t know many serial adulterers who hate women.
Bill Weld is a traitor to the party and, more importantly, the country. VDARE his written about his open borders extremism: https://vdare.com/articles/trump-challenger-wasp-patrician-bill-weld-has-immigration-views-that-would-destroy-america-what-s-wrong-with-him-them
As for Mayor Buttplug, homo-sexuals cannot be trusted. Buttplug’s “husband” is on social media whinging about how he’s not permitted to give blood. These maniacs think their egos are more important than the integrity of our blood supply.
I’m currently barred from giving blood as I was recently in a malarial zone. For some reason it hasn’t occurred to me to bitch about DISCRIMINATION.
Not an endorsement of Trump whose Presidency has failed based on the expectations he created during his campaign.
Though I remain baffled by people who personally hate the man. He’s the only President in my lifetime who gives the impression of actually liking the country he rules.
It’s true that he’s a liar, but I thought that was part of the job description.
i’m not quite at that level of accelerationist but with that quibble i’d say not a Vietnam – a war that got a lot of people killed without causing much of an economic shock.
from an ultra-accelerationist point of view it would be a war (or better yet a build up to a war that didn’t happen) which caused a massive economic shock and not a lot of actual physical damage.
bring back Hilary!
they’d support it if they got more than everyone else and white debils got less.
you may be right on that – i don’t know enough about it.
“Perhaps 95% of jobs people have today, did not exist 200 years earlier. This is because technology changes jobs. When technology changes the job, it is freeing the person to do something more useful.”
That’s not true. Most popular jobs today are shop clerks (retail cashiers), wagon drivers (transportation), and office clerks. Those jobs existed for centuries. The whole point of technology is to eliminate jobs, not create them. Whatever jobs tech created is minuscule relative to job losses incurred. And even more importantly, average IQ is around 100. You are not going to create a mass employment of IQ 90 data architects and software engineers going forward.
“Luddites think that steam machines will remove jobs as textile workers – and of course it does. But they created jobs as coal miners, factory workers and engineers.”
It didn’t. What created jobs was demand growth caused by population growth, with surplus population either killed in wars or sent to rape and pillage places like the Americas and Australia. If was basically War Socialism, except welfare checks, people and industries were built, fed, and killed in endless wars. Very brutal, and UBI is much better alternative for accomplishing same thing.
“Luddites think that cars will remove jobs as horsemen and horse feeders – and of course it does. But they created jobs as road builders and car manufacturers, and later bus and tax drivers.”
It didn’t. Just like before, jobs were created via War Socialism (government and bankers funding factories for world wars on credit), and again, surplus population as well as excess industrial capacity were killed off in wars. Post war, massive welfare states were created to pacify population. If that didn’t happen, unemployment would still be around 25%, and we would have social chaos.
“In the 1930s years, there was a lot less technology and automation, than today.”
In 1930’s, tractors killed employment on farms and forced people into homelessness and tent cities. It shows what automation does to population without welfare state and credit expansion. It took mass killing and destruction of world war II to bring production and consumption back in balance, all funded with massive government credit expansion.
It’s always the same. Technology causes social stress and to solve it, credit must expand. This credit expansion is either directed to military or welfare.
It’s your choice – World War III, or Universal Basic Income. There is no alternative, and has never been throughout recorded history. I pick UBI, far more productive in the long run, I think.
increased productivity in manufacturing/extraction supports an increased number of service jobs.
technology increases productivity i.e. a smaller workforce can create more stuff and some people lose their jobs. this is bad for them in the short term and should be managed carefully.
if the benefits of higher productivity are shared out between capital and labor the people working the new higher productivity jobs have more money to spend -> in the long term new jobs get created to soak up that increased spending cash.
the problem is for decades now capital has been using mass immigration to keep all the benefits of higher productivity to themselves – that is what needs to change.
“Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.” – Talleyrand
What do you mean or how do you understand the “credit expansion”?
Migrants are neither here nor there. They are still humans with incomes to spend, but of course, some would argue that their incomes are too low to keep credit velocity going, and so they are not economically useful.
As for the rest, nice theory, but that’s not reality. Yes, high productivity jobs are nice and very important, and we must have them to keep economy growing. However, majority of the population is physically incapable of performing them. And that’s not a matter of training. Like I said before, you are not going to see millions of IQ 90 people doing advanced software development. You are not going to see millions of cashiers become Production Directors at $billion factories.
What you will see instead is expansion of useless make work jobs such as diversity coordinators and medical billing receptionists for Medicare, such jobs are better IQ fit. Those jobs are useless and should be automated, and they are harmful for the social fabric of the nation.
However, if population loses income caused by elimination of useless and harmful jobs, high productivity jobs will also disappear. You can be super smart PhD software developer who can produce two Candy Crush apps per month while everyone else can only make one app per month.
However, if general population is incapable of production, and they dont have income to buy your apps, you are going to the unemployment line just like everybody else. That’s not ideal, hence ongoing massive credit expansion. Again, this is inevitable, and would much rather have this credit fund UBI than the next world war.
Look up the world balance sheet. Global government, corporate, and household debt. I think it’s around $250 trillion right now. That’s the aggregate value of unproductive goods and services, this kind of credit can fund UBI for a very long time. Or it can fund a very nice war.
Sure. As long as you have credit expansion and welfare/warfare state to support all those shoppers, making use of service sector labor. Today however, it appears that service sector is not productive – we would not need to print 4% Federal budget deficit to generate 3% GDP growth otherwise.
the deliberate over supply of labor is central.
the simplest way to characterize what has happened over recent decades is:
one full-time 40K job -> two part-time 16K jobs.
I think female work force participation had much more significant impact on that front.
it has been the reality over the course of the industrial revolution.
higher productivity
-> dislocation for the workers using the old technology, often very damaging
-> higher wages for the workers in the new jobs
-> increase in service jobs over time due to that increased demand
this is probably true now which means we need to be reducing the total population while increasing the average quality.
what TPTB are doing is increasing total population and reducing average quality.
UBI in the current context would be an attempt to sedate the target population while they are finished off.
so you accept over-supply of labor has an effect?
if increased productivity is shared out between capital and labor it leads to increased demand – no need for credit expansion.
if all the benefit of increased productivity goes to capital it doesn’t lead to increased demand.
“higher productivity
-> dislocation for the workers using the old technology, often very damaging
-> higher wages for the workers in the new jobs
-> increase in service jobs over time due to that increased demand”
That’s not where the increased demand is really coming from. If Western (and Japanese/Chinese) governments and Central Banks decided to run balanced books right now, we would have Great Depression again.
“this is probably true now which means we need to be reducing the total population while increasing the average quality.”
Barring genetic engineering, unlikely to happen.
“UBI in the current context would be an attempt to sedate the target population”
Exactly! Social chaos is not desirable.
“while they are finished off.”
Maybe, based on fertility rates, but also unlikely. I think equilibrium population will be reached at some point, but I’m not certain. Still, better than brutal war.
Yes, sure, oversupply of labor will drive individual income down. In your example, $40k full time job becomes two $16k jobs and $8k profit for corporate owner. Aggregate income won’t change as much though. Instead of one person spending income, you will have two Mexican roommates or a husband and wife and a corp owner.
Where it gets extreme is a robot costing $200 in electricity replacing a $40k job, and when Robot Maintenance Technician becomes a skill 80% of the population are physically incapable of doing.
right – because over recent decades the benefit of increased productivity has all gone to capital as a result of their deliberate over supply of labor – hence the need to keep the economy afloat with debt.
industrial nations all have below replacement fertility so without immigration the population reduction part would be happening naturally. improving average quality at the same time would require some kind of incentive program.
it’s not desirable for the people who are currently doing well out of the system. i think it’s highly desirable.
I think you may be right. But how do you convince women that feminism is fundamentally and rabidly misogynistic when misogyny is defined in terms of anti-feminism?
I think you have to present people with the stark reality. We are each the end product of over four billion years of organic evolution during which virtually every single line of descent died out, but astoundingly, not our own. The fact remains, however, that the chances of any one of us having been born is unimaginably low — it is negligible to the point of near infinitessimality.
So here’s the question. Do you say, (A) “So What? Who cares whether my place on earth is taken by my own progeny, or the progeny of those of my own race, nation, or gene pool”?
Or do you say, (B) I may love all humanity but I love my own kind, my own tribe, my own nation and family above others, and I wish their existence on earth to be perpetuated indefinitely”?
If you say “yes” to (A), you are for genocide of your own people and a reliable dupe of the politically-correct globalist Money Power, as a consequence of which you will grow old in a society that bears ever less resemblance racially and in custom and religion to the society in which you were raised, and your death will be mourned by few.
If you say “Yes” to (B), then may you have the good fortune to grow old among your own people, your own nation, your own family, in a world that respects the traditions and the people among whom your grew up and honors your contribution to the perpetuation of your own kind.
“if increased productivity is shared out between capital and labor it leads to increased demand – no need for credit expansion.
if all the benefit of increased productivity goes to capital it doesn’t lead to increased demand.”
I agree, but with with ever increasing importance of capital and decline in importance of labor, benefits will inevitably flow to capital. Labor lost this fight a long time ago. I mean, who will be more important? Factory owner who can design and build a $billion factory, or a janitor sweeping the floor in it? If janitor demands more income, he will simply be replaced with robot. Hence benefits will concentrate with few people who know how to build janitor replacing robots.
No, I don’t think so. He’s botched just about everything he’s touched, while making repeated buffoonish displays of his idiotic political correctness.
right – that’s the key point – the same total amount of money but people who are already wealthy don’t spend it in the same way as the middle class so current demand goes down.
say
– middle-class people spend 80% and save 20%
– wealthy people spend 20% and save 80%
then
– increased concentration of wealth -> lower demand + higher saving
(in theory that higher saving might be benign if it went into increased productive investment but it’s gone into asset bubbles)
i agree – for most of the industrial revolution increased productivity in manufacturing/extraction led eventually (usually after a lot of pain) to increased service sector jobs, many of them low skilled, but now we’ve hit the limit and need to reduce population.
i agree – i think the only way out is reduced population of higher average IQ.
space elves.
affordable family formation.
the most maternal women would drop out and have kids and over time their daughters would take over the gene pool.
Hence the need for a VAT and a wealth tax to take back much of what the owners of the robots, drones, computers, and software take as profit from taking away everything from millions of Americans.
With no income tax on us.
I don’t think it helps to frame it in terms of evolution.
ToE is what led to the crisis of motivation.
You won’t be able to get out of the current situation using the language of the current situation. At best, you’ll only succeed in creating a more subtle form of the current situation.
We need fresh thinking, new terminology, and new concepts. Working with the old concepts that got us into trouble won’t work.
The basic kernel of the “old” mentality is that it “deflates” mans ego. Don’t think your tribe is best or that humanity is anything special. Foreigners are just as good as you or maybe better, and humanity is no better than the animals and maybe even worse.
This is the attitude that became fully developed in Europe by the 19th century – I call it “deflationary”, because its basic premise is to “dispraise” man and oneself.
(ToE stems from the same root as Western putting oneself down at the expense of other races, the same “deflationary impulse).
In contrast, all the old religions and traditional societies are systems that “glorify” mankind and oneself.
We are special beings with unique value and a special destiny, and our particular tribe and religion is best. The whole tendency and impulse was away from “deflationary” language and towards “glorification” language.
Now, I note that you are actually making an attempt at glorification language when you point out how special and unlikely it is that any of us is even born. You have the right instincts here. I just don’t think you can really come up with a good glorification system from within a theory that is manly about deflating mans ego.
In the end, I think what will happen is people will get tired of self-hate, just as they got tired of self-praise.
ToE is just no fun after a while. All the non-whites get to glorify themselves and humanity but whites have to see humanity as a random accident and themselves as no better than anyone. That’s already why sensitive whites are defecting.
Its gonna get boring for the majority after a while.
We just have to wait. Everything in its season.
I am starting to speculate that the essence of religion is self-glorification – of humanity, of one’s self, one’s tribe.
God, the highest being there is, gives one value.
If this is so, then non religious societies cannot have healthy self-esteem. And the European project to become “objective” meant in practice to “deflate” European man.
European man faces the world with a “deflated” ego – everyone else with a firmly rooted ego.
Hinduism – man is God, he has the highest value.
Buddhism – man is a Buddha in embryo, a being higher than the Gods.
Judaism, Islam, Christianity – man is made in the image of God, the highest being, and thus has the highest value.
Confucianism – man is heir to glorious ancestors of highest value.
Taoism – man is one with nature, the All, and has the highest value as there is nothing beyond the All.
Paganism – man is linked to the realm of the Gods, the beings of highest value, who take an interest in the human realm. And man is heir to glorious ancestors.
Now finally we come to modern Europe –
ToE – man is a random accident no better than the animals. He is not special and has no destiny.
Similar philosophies – Stoicism and Epicureanism. These are half way between ToE and religions. Gods are irrelevant but there is a vision of human dignity, although one that is limited to man not feeling too much pain at his circumstances. Dignity consists in mastering adverse circumstances.
Tepid stuff, which is why it died out. But even this is better than ToE.
So, as the final part to my trilogy of comments, I will offer the suggestion that we need to come up with a theory that sanctifies the world and man.
ToE doesn’t do that.
I am not saying we must return to traditional religion. But our approach to humanity, the world as it is, and ourselves, must be essentially optimistic and positive.
ToE offers a vision of a world without value and a humanity without value. By extension – white people have no value. (If any other people adopted ToE to the same extent, they too would feel their race has no value).
Can this be done sign in the framework of ToE? So far, such attempts have not succeeded.
To be a little cynical, Mr. Yang talks his book.
Perhaps a moratorium on patents or a drastic reduction of patent terms to, say, three years would reduce the incentive to create these job destroying technologies. Or to paraphrase Kevin Carson, it’s not that robots are bad, but who owns the robots, ie we would all welcome a robotic corn picking machine if it was our field and our corn, to maximize the results our labor. But in fact, we have to compete against robots for the right to pick the landowners corn.
Also copyright, instead of the 100+ years it has morphed into, reduce the term for all non-fiction works to 3 years, and all publicly funded scientific work to zero.
We are given UBI as a sop, where we need the tools to help ourselves to be given back to us.
Actually, I think loving oneself and the world is the human default….
So really all we have to do is not suppress this instinct. ToE simply suppresses this instinct. Remove it, and natural biological love of life and self will spring back in its own. We are, at bottom, healthy.
So it may be that we don’t have to come up with any new theories – simply no longer adhere to ToE religiously.
In this sense we may not have to do anything – simply stop doing what we’ve been doing since the 19th century.
In this way theorizing is the problem. We may have to simply say we don’t know, like the Buddhists and Taoists, then our natural love1 of life, ourselves, and our tribe will take over.
But as long as we know that ToE is true – it will suppress our spontaneous self-love.
Read some of my rants and proposals about immigration, both illegal and “legal”, before calling me a shill or saying that I ignore immigration. Quite the contrary.
Automation has wiped out and will wipe out tens of millions of jobs in North America even if we wise up and do all the things that I favor: stop all net immigration, end birthright citizenship, end chain migration / family reunification, build a wall, give our troops orders to shoot to kill all invaders at the border, deport non citizens convicted of any felony, tax the Hell out of remittances to abroad, require a substantial test of written and spoken English for anyone wanting citizenship, require people to do twenty years of permanent residency before becoming eligible for citizenship, etc.
Yeah man I’m ignoring immigration and shilling for open borders.
We are on the same side here. I’m ready for your apology 😉
Excellent idea.
But we’d still have tens of millions of able bodied adults thrown out of work by automation.
End all h1b visas tomorrow, and we’ll still have uber and taxi and truck drivers largely replaced by self-driving vehicles.
End all h1b’s tomorrow, and we’ll still have retail and restaurant employment substantially cut by increased use of touchscreens, computers, and then robots.
Still have amazon warehouse jobs moving even more towards robots.
How about restricting h1b’s AND instituting a UBI for all us citizens age 21 and over WHO FILED A FEDERAL TAX RETURN FOR THE PAST FIVE CONSECUTIVE YEARS. That would disqualify anyone who worked off the books and didn’t file a Fed return even in one of those years.
Maybe. But a lot of the service jobs that have been created are menial work at near-starvation wages, carried out by women or immigrants who are not unionised and therefore get horrendously exploited. What the growth in service jobs is doing is to create a new docile (for the moment) servant class.
Manufacturing jobs were done by men who earned enough to buy homes and support families.
So in social terms it’s still a disaster.
What “majority”?
Yes, those are valid points.
That’s why high IQ people love him. It was high IQ people who invented political correctness.
If everyone with an IQ above 100 were banned from voting we’d have much better governments. High IQ makes people believe absurd things that lower IQ people recognise as crazy.
That might help a little.
Yang isn’t suggesting that.
i agree it is now.
my point is historically if you look at say 1650-1950 the pattern has been increased productivity leading to a more prosperous society.
it went wrong in the years after 1965 as the benefit of increased productivity stopped being shared out between labor and capital.
Very good article!
Nonetheless, it’s all so tiresome. HONK.
For problems created by in-groups in White nations, Asians are Jews with orange chicken.
For Iranians, sure. But what do we do, here in America, when our blacks give the Cadillac dealership their $16K instead of spending it on food or rent?
You’re right. One of the several major problems with Yang, or anyone from the lefty and/or elitist bubble designing any program, including the UBI.
Republicans should trade their support for a UBI, for an end to birthright citizenship, end to chain migration, an end to diversity visa lottery, and a full-length wall manned full time, every mile, by our military. Make people ask themselves, “Do dems care about American citizens, or do they always care more about whoever is the next foreigner to invite to partake of our earnings and resources and teach to resent us?”
Instead, the republicans will oppose the UBI and get nothing in return for its eventual passage under a Dem White House, senate, and house. Which is what we will get as millions of people lose their jobs and careers to automation and the dems pose as protectors of the people.
most truck drivers know how to use a tire iron.
not sure about uber drivers.
Funny, but doesn’t change the fact that Uber, Lyft, and other major freight and passenger transport companies continue to research, test, and improve vehicles that will reduce the number of these jobs substantially, fairly soon.
First the vehicles may need a driver who is doing little to nothing on the highway portion of a long haul, stepping in only for the local portion at the end.
It seems that in some cases, the trucks may need only a human driver or controller who watches remotely and intervenes only as necessary. Local driving, which includes by far most Uber/taxi rides, will probably take longer to automate but we can’t assume it won’t happen there too.
There are other people whose careers will be badly damaged by automation and AI in the near future, of course, not just truckers. Fast-food and grocery-store employees continue to be reduced by increased use of self-checkout with touchscreens and scanners.
Even radiologists, paralegals, and some attorneys will be losing hours, getting less pay, because of the additional functions that computers can now perform consistently well (reading X-ray or MRI film and making diagnoses and recommendations, reviewing documents for terms or concepts or privileged info to be redacted).
People like Yang may have their own reason for scaring the public about the sheer size of the coming mass unemployment / underemployment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not actually coming. Already underway, in fact.
Speaking of orange chickens… I channeled Mayer Amschel Rothschild last night and this is what he said to me:
Give me control of a nation’s currency and I care not how many smart Chinamen are running for POTUS promising to give you one or ten or how many thousands of dollars per month of free cash. We Jews, and my descendants, in particular, are the only ones allowed to make and give you dumb goys free cash.
I also like Yang policies, there is a caveat though. He promotes UBI in lieu of, or as a replacement to Social Security. This is a major problem.
If I get a federal pension do I get UBI also?
If I get a private pension, do I still get UBI?
Why single out Social Security as separate and distinct with regards to UBI? Why does he conflate the two?
The same for Social Security Disability. It’s basically an insurance program. If I get an insurance payout do I lose UBI? Again, why conflate the two?
This may be an attempt by the Silicon Valley guys to throttle entitlements. If so, it’s a problem. Or maybe he just hasn’t thought about it yet. Either way I’d like an answer.
You can find an Audiobook version of Yang’s book on YouTube.
Listened to his interview on Joe Rogan. A premise of his, often repeated but never challenged, is the inevitability of things like autonomous trucks eliminating truck driving jobs. While it’s true that various Tech Giants are working tirelessly to destroy the middle class (among other things), this can be stopped through regulation. Case in point, modern autopilots can easily out perform human pilots in all phases of flight, yet every country on earth mandates pilot(s) on board and in command.
So long as the Electoral Collage is maintained, the Populists in the Fly Over zone can maintain some control should they collectively choose to do so.
Pensions, gov or private, not affected by UBI. Can get both in yang’s current proposal.
Wondering which other Fed benefits one would have to give up to get the UBI. No way should elderly people (most of whom worked their whole lives and paid in) have to give up any part of SocSec or Medicare to get the UBI.
Presumably he means that the value of food stamps (WIC or SNAP benefits) is deducted from the UBI. But what else?
Yang wants Medicare for all, so presumably that won’t be given up in return for the UBI.
Still, we will be serfs if we don’t stop and reverse the egregious overconcentration of income, wealth and opportunities.
Amazon, Google, and the rest of our wound-be overlords need to be heavily taxed and regulated. Regular us citizens should be freed from the income tax, and a VAT and a hefty wealth tax instituted to take back some chunk of the megacompanies’ profits (much of it from automation, AI, and outsourcing) and save Americans from destitution. (Throw in a tax on remittances of cash heading out of the USA, while we’re at it.)
Right now, half of us pay and don’t get much direct benefit in return, while tens of millions get welfare, get free money from the EITC (including noncitizens!), food stamps, Medicaid, and here in California a “free” car seat / stroller / baby formula too. If the system is going to give away our earnings and run until collapse, we AMERICAN taxpayers and workers should get a piece in the meanwhile.
Yang is an intriguing fellow – he would make an excellent economic advisor to some President not predisposed to walk his staff off the plank one by one as expediency dictates. So, maybe the Prez after Trump.
Who is going to coast to re-election, btw, regardless of his many flaws and faux pas, and for the same reason he won the first time: the alternative is far worse. Given that we have all been forced to witness the left’s insanity, unscrupulousness and bald-faced dishonesty for the past few years with varying levels of appalled disbelief, 2020 will be a slam dunk of such proportions that CW2 may well kick off before Inauguration Day 2021.
The Democrats have led the way this young century in turning the traditional lame duck term into a fully-weaponized season of scorched earth. My fingers are crossed that Mr Trump will join in that particular card game – see them, and raise them – after next November.
He should be running as alternative Republican, not alternative Democrat.
Why does UBI only go up to age 64?
Sadly, Yang expressed support for Israel and a free-hand to do what it wants in Palestine. When asked whether the US should reduce aid to Israel, Yang answered that if anything, we ought to give more to our ally. Execrable.
This isn’t UBI. It’s either some form of welfare or compensation for lost assets. And Milton Friedman did not support UBI. He supported a negative income tax, which is a slightly different thing, a kind of welfare built into the tax code.
A negative income tax would be preferable to UBI.
UBI has many problems. And eventually, it will pave the road to hell as government dirigisme becomes normalized in a way we’ve never seen before.
UBI also keeps the current crony capitalist system going for longer. The rich will continue to get richer. And the poor will be mollified with UBI.
We use Ooma as our phone provider. They have a virtual receptionist and it cut our spam calls to nothing. A person can press a number to reach you , robo calls never ring you phone. I’m sure other VOIP services have the same features, there are also hardware solutions that accomplish the same thing.
Goys are every non jew. Nothing to prove you wrong in, you’ve made ambiguous and meaningless statements, devoid of any substance
What, is this the same 3D chess with which the most moronic Trumpkins credit their leader?
No, sir, Andrew Yang is not a Democrat for pure political reasons. He’s a Democrat because he’s a goofball who thinks sodomite marriage and abortion are basic human rights.
I don’t need some PoS from China coming here to tell me how run the nation that my ancestors built.