Andrew Yang Enters Mayor's Race with Scaled Back Plan for Universal Basic Income | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Yang Enters Mayor's Race with Scaled Back Plan for Universal Basic Income

gothamist.com

111 pointspseudolus80 comments

> According to a source with the Yang campaign, his revamped UBI plan would grant 500,000 New Yorkers in the greatest need an annual $2,000 - $5,000 through a program administered by the city’s Human Resources Administration, the same city agency that administers other benefits programs.

So it’s municipal-level welfare (means tested). Calling it scaled-back UBI is pretty disingenuous. Also, I wonder how well this works at the city level.

No need to speculate, there are plenty of countries doing variations on UBI already, and they have been for many decades. We can learn from what they do.

Australia gives around $1130 AUD / month to anyone that is low income, or doesn't have a job [1] (There is an additional $300/mo right now for COVID, but lets ignore that.)

It is means tested, but the result is that anyone that doesn't have a job (for any reason at all - don't want one, quit, can't be bothered) gets that payment. You get more if you have kids, and you might get more for rent assistance too. It's been that way for decades, and Australia's economy has not magically been destroyed. Inflation is not through the roof, prices did not magically go up to just use up this free money.

On the plus side, crime and violence are extremely low, and multiple Australian cities are in the top 100 most livable on the planet. [2]

[1] https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/services/ce...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/global-liveability-index-201...

That’s all well and good, but if the payments don’t actually go to everyone, they aren’t “Universal”.

Perhaps more comparable is the cash for every citizen programs that many oil rich gulf states run.

E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_...

And

https://www.wellesley.edu/albright/about/blog/3926-downsides...

Also,

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydor...

UBI and welfare (what we have in Australia) are very different. Andrew Yang has spoken about this better than I could off the top of my head, but to add a few things about our system (which does work very well from a global perspective):

* The stigma (in non-covid times) toward "dole bludgers" is pretty significant. We're a pretty egalitarian society, but there's a fairly common distain towards welfare recipients. This would likely be reduced if everyone was receiving the payment.

* You mentioned that recipients receive payments even if they quit or can't be bothered getting a job. That's kind of the situation with the current payment (JobSeeker), which was created last year when covid hit. The usual adult benefit (formally called Newstart allowance) had very strict "mutual obligations" and required you to apply for N number of jobs per fortnight otherwise your benefits were cut (https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/topics/mutu...). Also, if you quit a job you would have a cooldown period (usually 8 weeks) before you would receive benefits (with exceptions for injuries, redundancy, etc).

* Rent assistance is basically guaranteed. If you pay rent, you will get a portion of this covered.

* Our welfare program also includes a pharmaceutical discount (almost all prescription meds are $6.60 for recipients).

It's a really decent program overall, but it's not UBI.

Obviously welfare isn't identical to UBI, though in my opinion it has many of the same results.

> * The stigma*

Sure, there's some stigma, but that's irrelevant in terms of the economic/financial impact to society.

> very strict "mutual obligations"

It's easy enough to fill out job applications left hand, etc. For anyone that wants it, it is extremely easy and TONS of friends from University did it for over a decade.

Anecdotally, the mutual obligations have ratcheted up quite substantially since I was at uni 10-15 years ago. There have been several scandals involving accredited "Employment Services Providers" mistreating applicants, most commonly around offering them unsuitable (dangerous, to themselves or others) work at a firm controlled by the ESP.

Applicants can't refuse, or they'll lose their payment, and this is taken advantage of.

Here in Hong Kong, some years, flat payments are made to every legal permanent resident. It's kind of UBI, with flat payments and no means testing, but it fluctuates a lot. When it's payment scheme time, my bank puts up posters near ATMs reminding people to go to the government website and register their accounts to receive the wire transfer.

That being said, we have a very high wealth gap here. My understanding is that social programs are generally very lacking.

Municipal, and not universal. So it's BI.

MBI

As long as the cut-off is fairly simple, I really think a BI (as you call it) is a good idea.

This is from a UK perspective, but my opinion on this is partly practical (to avoid waste) and partly ethical as the ruling classes generally don't view poor people as being worthy of financial autonomy (They actually have more in common with socialists on this matter that they would be comfortable with).

We've just seen recently a scandal where the government, rather than just giving people money ("Money can be exchanged for goods and services."), has paid some contractor to dole out - at potentially significant cost, although the figure seems to be wildly varying depending on whom you ask - some tins of beans and pasta.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55641740

Can someone explain to me why this wouldnt cause an influx of very unproductive people who would like a no strings attached $2-5k?

Because moving to NYC from pretty much anywhere else would increase your annual cost of living by far more than $5,000. Net you’d lose.

Bus tickets cost $5000?

Rent costs far more than $5000/year in nyc.

what about for folks who are already homeless?

Do they qualify as residents in this scheme? Seems unlikely, if just because it's difficult to decide whether someone asking for xxxx dollars is part of nyc if they don't have a home. Seems likely because they are in the most in need.

I am genuinely unsure.

I'm not talking about people who rent

It'd make it a far more attractive move from here in SF, but even then it's a pretty mild incentive.

Homeless in Baltimore, or homeless in NYC?

I'm progressive but I recognize the issues with municipal universal welfare.

What would be the process for a homeless person from Baltimore to become a homeless NYC resident in order to take advantage of this? I'd imagine it's not as simple as just showing up in NYC. Serious question, just something I've never thought about.

That's the broader point about universal welfare. If there is no friction in someone moving from a place without it to a place with it, of course people will try to claim it from any place.

So unless they set up some kind of residency requirement or collect biometric info from the homeless and register them as NYC beneficiaries, I don't know what would keep homeless people from coming from other areas (other than, of course, a lack of money or transport).

This has been observed in Californian cities.

I can’t explain it to you, and from my first hand observation this is exactly what it creates.

Without going into details, people know how to get every type of aid from the government and live under virtual welfare for extended periods of time (well before retirement age). The total aid amounts to well over 10-30k easily.

I know people that take advantage of it and honestly I can’t believe we all foot the tax bill for it. It’s free money, people will find a way to get it, the same way corporations find tax havens.

The incentives aren’t right, and the loopholes too many. We cannot pay for freaking everything as there really is a moral hazard argument to be made here, especially when it’s obvious it’s misallocated.

Whenever I see a comment like this, it's hard not to take it personal. When my parents came to America as refugees, they wanted to come to CA specifically because there was already a community and an understanding that the social programs were better than the alternative of TX.

Of course they tried to take advantage of programs like food stamps. They took advantage of it because they met what the government considered as qualified. The alternative, which my parents did have to do at times, was skipping meals so their kids had enough to eat. It's not taking advantage of a system if the people meet the requirements. No one says they're taking advantage of a coupon at a grocery store, it's there to be used.

I think some mean "take advantage" to mean abuse of the safety net system (by some, not everyone). Which takes away from truly desperate people.

This argument doesn't really work without data/numbers to back it up. I'm pretty relaxed about some percentage of welfare going to people who are gaming the system and don't want to work as long as the people who need it are getting it.

In the UK: "A poll conducted by the Trades Union Congress in 2012 found that perceptions among the British public were that benefit fraud was high – on average people thought that 27% of the British welfare budget is claimed fraudulently; however, official UK Government figures have stated that the proportion of fraud stands at 0.7% of the total welfare budget in 2011/12."

Hard to know what percentage the people would accept in practice, but I've gotta suspect it's higher than the actual percentage that exists.

Not sure if you are talking about PPP loan fraud, loss carry forward, or some other scam that the extremely wealthy are able to pull but I'm interested to know which one!

Maybe they should literally dump coins in the street like they did in Switzerland.

It’d produce more physical exercise.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-25415922

But really, there are people that need it. Just maybe not the ones getting it.

He’s a good idealist (not dogmatic), and he’d likely be better than a Cuomo or a Wilhelm, because I see him addressing issues rather than busy placating corruption.

NYC needs a good mayor. I wish him luck.

That is exactly why the Democratic machine will be against him. I don’t expect him to get any endorsements from the establishment.

Funny, De Blasio was sold as a good idealist when he first ran. And he was. Unfortunately. we discovered that the idealism did not translate to everyday competence.

I see some dangers of that in Yang's proposals, too. He wants the city to take ownership of the subway. Great. I'd like that too. But Cuomo has absolutely no intention of letting that happen. Absent any detail of how he'll change that, what am I even voting for?

If he wins, I expect the tech support to draw in tech talent into government. That will be a good thing.

I think that would be good for tech-specific things. But improving schools or public housing isn't much of a tech problem.

Tech can’t fix everything. It can’t fix graft and corruption. You need people like Morgenthau and Giuliani but even more fearless and aggressive to rip out corruption by just about everyone in government. Start with a clean slate. But that cannot happen.

Think “deep interests”.

I would think tech could clear up some corruption. Open and transparent accounting would be a good start.

There's nothing secret about New York's "deep interests" - real estate development is the city's king maker.

I mean the billion-dollar per mile subways, the graft, the garbage collection, holding up mixed concrete deliveries (ruining it), etc., etc. it does not end.

A "Move fast and break things" approach isn't really desirable in government.

Why? Purely curious, what’s wrong with trying lots of things quickly and reverting quickly if it breaks something?

Because the “something” is often people’s livelihoods and reverting policy doesn’t always undo the damage it causes.

With software, nothing.

With human systems? The impact of your change is not always readily apparent, easily traceable, or based in logic.

Particularly, because there is always going to be lag between change and outcome as the humans adapt their behaviour over human time scales, not computer time scales.

Implementing any political changes requires support from other stakeholders. After a politician breaks things a few times that support evaporates, regardless of successes in other areas.

Instead we get "move slow and keep things broken".

What the ideals are matters! https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/nyregion/a-mayoral-hopefu...

> Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.

Yang has had a much more down-to-earth career in philanthropy and business.

Yeah, I don't see Yang as a leftist at all. He may be liberal, but not a leftist (who are often too dogmatic).

I have no idea where the hell Bill de Blasio's imagination went, but it's striking. They guy acts like the cops have his family at gunpoint or something.

Are you suggesting Bill de Blasio should have done, more of whatever the heck he's trying to do?

Absolutely! His first campaign sounded nice, and then extremely little of note has happened. I don't like a lot of what Bloomberg did, but there was certainly more of it.

Bill de Blasio is a genuinely confusing when he isn't just being pathetic.

Why is it means tested? Just give it to everyone and simplify the process of distributing it. If you really want to not pay the rich, just raise taxes by a proportional amount.

I don't understand the concern that somehow we should draw lines around who gets a benefit and who doesn't. Build the simplest system. Are you a human? Get benefit.

If you really want to claw back that from folks, raise a progressive tax.

Potential reason (I don't know if true motivation): While it doesn't make financial sense, it could convince some people who would otherwise say they don't want to give money to the rich. The sight inefficiency will not break the system, but bigger opposition may stop it from being tried.

$2000 x 8.4 million residents would be nearly 20% of the NYC's budget is why.

Because NYC cannot deficit spend or unilaterally issue good taxes like the federal government can.

The real question is why doesn't NYC create its own local currency to skirt those restriction.

Curiously enough, New York State has flirted with the idea of "State Citizenship" [1].

On currency NY could in theory issue their own (maybe even a cryptocurrency), but there might be some issues with the constitution's Supremacy Clause (while collecting taxes).

Yang's platform also proposes a public banking system by way.

[1] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2013/s7879

I thought NYC had an income tax and property taxes separate from state level taxes?

Somewhat, but I remember many stories of Bill de Blasio trying to beg Cuomo for this or thew new billionaires tax, and Cuomo just laughing him out of the room.

In lieu of raising taxes to claw it back, I hope it at least phases out so there's less of an incentive to game your way towards eligibility. I think Yang understands this, but it would otherwise create yet another welfare trap.

That's what "means tested" means. Phasing it out by how much income you make. That's specifically the issue I have with this policy. We should be taking care of everyone, and everyone should be entitled to certain baselines.

We should also tax the wealthy enough to ensure we cover those baselines.

It's much simpler to do that than arrange every benefit with a means testing system that needs monitoring and adjudication.

let's take this to the logical extreme:

- everyone gets a flat payment

- in order to support this, taxes are raised on income

- ... however, ostensibly this is progressive (read: not flat and scales up with income) insofar as we don't want to tax those who just received necessary payments

so, the best we can end up with in a theoretical world is a negative income tax by another name, with the 0% tax rate exactly at whatever the "living wage" is for NYC. this seems largely like means testing by another route (what is a "living wage?"), but i guess it's simpler than bolting on another welfare matrix with cliffs, rules and such. pragmatically: good luck getting there.

Sometimes I think Yang is too good for politics: he's smart (and surrounds himself with smart ideas) and from everything I've seen, a very genuine person.

That said the appeals of his campaign hinged on policies that worked nationally, while he's running locally. What resonated in Iowa then may not excite New Yorkers the same. Let's see how that goes.

UBI is something that countries need to set up when times are flush and everyone is willing to give it a go because there's enough money to spread around and few objections.

I don't think it'll fly when everything is in the toilet and we're already deep in the red.

most countries can't do basic Keynesian economics

Stock market is ridiculous right now.

Maybe most people aren't flush, but the people with most of the money are.

That's not the truism it appears. I mean they don't just have more than you, they have more than they themselves did yesterday.

Andrew is likely going to win. He has established quite a brand. I mean who gets national spotlight for running a city mayor amid all the big news.

NYC is a pretty big city (the biggest in the US) and the NYC mayor is one of the more important positions in US politics. They have been household names for quite some time. Giuliani was a household name before Trump because of this. After 9/11 he was even called "America's Mayor." de Blasio is often on the news and Bloomberg used to be.

I think this is a good time to plug

> https://www.jainfamilyinstitute.org/

Which is real UBI-friendly brain trust in NYC. In fact, I would expect them to have a research/policy platform popular for a variety of reasons in this corner of the internet

Why should poor people without jobs live in New York, one of the most expensive cities? Wouldn't it be cheaper and more effective to pay them to leave, and give them bus tickets to do so?

Maybe that'll work when all poor people jobs are replaced with robots. But until then we still need janitors, fast food workers, grocers, and other jobs that currently pay at or near minimum wage. Unless you want to bus them in and out of the city every day which has other complications and borders a company store.

The obvious answer to me is that those jobs should pay a living wage for the area that they're in. Minimum wage in the USA is atrocious compared to most of the rest of the west.

not really true. Significant parts of Europe don't even have a minimum wages, in particular the ones American progressives keep referencing like Denmark, and instead rely on collective bargaining agreements. At the state level US minimum wage can be quite high (15$ in NY), the highest min wage in Europe is France, with 11€

But the market pays unskilled laborers $15 in the US (Amazon, Target, Walmart), which puts it ahead of all EU government minimums, right?

Also, those jobs do pay a lot more in the expensive cities. Remember the story of the San Francisco transit janitor who made $270k / year?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-janitor-pay-2700...

Well, it's a rational thought, but you'll still be skewered for saying it out loud.

It's something to do with people thinking they should have an entitlement to live somewhere they've lived for a long time no matter how much it costs or changes around them. And makes it more expensive.

And policy makers unwilling to say otherwise.

Because it's cheaper to serve people's needs in big cities than everywhere else. The suburbs are inefficient as hell and killing our planet.

People spend too much time looking looking at dollar amounts and not enough time thinking about the actual work being done. I'd expect better from what purports to be a site full of engineers.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I think it is only meaningful for UBI to be tested, at minimum, on a country level.

Ideally, in a place such as New Zealand, to avoid negative effects of increased migration, attracted solely by UBI

The steakhouses will definitely oppose Yang. He has proposed a "cow fart" tax that would make steak prohibitively expensive.[1]

1. https://mobile.twitter.com/tomselliott/status/11747488189880...

By the time this election happens, there won’t be any steakhouses left in Manhattan.

Good point.

But don’t the Aussies make cows fart better now

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