As someone who disagrees on most things with yang and sanders, I didnt see the most attractive thing about yangs proposal: this UBI replaces other social safety net programs and aims to gain efficiency by eliminating the overhead from multiple government offices.
This isn’t a big selling point on the left. It would be in the general, but the make-up of the primary voters is further to the left. Dismantling government programs isn’t their jam.
It's also an awfully big "if" that it would actually replace them. "I promise" isn't enough to risk ending up with both the UBI and all the current programs. Therefore the qualifications aimed at those who disagree on fiscal grounds simply evaporate when the policy meets the real world. Bait and switch is older than politics.
You can probably guess why that wasn't raised by Yang - people who have said programs or think that poor people benefiting from said programs would see it as a bad trade.
Personally, without cost containment on the supplier side (ie, inflation), or pegging this benefit to inflation, it sounds like a bad idea.
Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent.
> Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent.
That looks interesting; can I have a source for those numbers?
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