Andrew Yang has singled himself out among all the candidates for president by coming up with a radical proposal - give $1,000 a month to every adult in the country and build a trickle-up economy.
It’s an expensive idea, and that alone will kill it. It’s a radical idea, and that alone will kill it. Lots of people say it will only encourage the lazy, the losers and the undeserving, and that will kill it.
Well, they my be right, or they may be wrong, but just saying those things will probably kill the idea as well.
So, let’s just take a few minutes and look at the conversation he has started, the one beyond “It’s crazy and he has no chance.”
I think he is a man ahead of his time, probably generations ahead of his time. That’s because Capitalism has driven the progress of mankind since we invented money, but it may be time to put a governor on the machine.
Our wonderful capitalist machine really does run by itself as we approach the 21st century. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” creates fortunes and mega-fortunes in ways a lot of us don’t understand. Think you do? Just read the entire 3Q statement of any mutual fund.
When you finish it, in a year or so, you might know where that fund was when you started. But only If you ignore the footnotes, which is where the real information can often be found.
Or explain to me just what automated trading is - how the algorithms that drive changes in stock market trading by giving value to events and actions really work, or how they evaluate volume trades and price changes.
So what?
Let’s not miss the main point. The economy is going great, despite the dangers from really big problems that are ignored in the short term. Our unemployment numbers are getting worse and the official figures don’t actually reflect the size of the problem because they ignore people no longer looking for jobs. Full employment has come to mean people working at two or three part-time jobs because that is the only work they can get. And, don’t get me started on private contract workers - the people who work for a company but are not in the company.
I was a private contract worker once. I delivered newspapers on my bicycle, and the newspaper didn’t have to worry about things like insurance or benefits, or deal with replacing me if I got sick. That was my problem. I bought the papers and made about seven cents a week for each customer, plus tips. If I missed a day, people asked for a refund from the paper and I lost money for the week.
So, here comes Andrew Yang who wants to set a $12,000 annual income floor for every adult in the country. Frankly, I could use the money.
But what about the debt? Well, our Republican government gave a big tax break to the wealthy and to corporations that added a trillion dollars to our national debt, and that we will be paying for with interest. Lots of companies became wealthy by using that money to buy back stock.
Let me explain how that works. Your company is worth $10 million, and you have 5 million shares of stock outstanding. Each share would be worth $2, depending on your dividends. Now lets say you used your government tax gift to buy back 10 per-cent of the shares. Every share you hold has just gone up 10 per-cent. And you haven’t created a single job.
Now if all that money went to every adult, we would have a lot more customers for a lot of things. Prices would change, of course, and rents would probably go up. But more people would be buying lots of things they might not be able to afford now, and more people would be needed to make them, and ship them and sell them. That’s job creation.
Now, I do worry about our federal deficit. And I know that the first one to try something new often fails. Kinda like the first woman running for president or the first person who said slavery was wrong.
But I also know that the technology that keeps our economy going results in fewer workers each year, and we have to recognize there will be a lot more people out of work. Training for new jobs just won’t make up for the actual job losses and the extra competition for new positions as more and more unemployed people compete for the new jobs.
Now, The Future
So, what to do? In Star Trek - and there have been lots of interesting things written about the Star Trek economy where people no longer need money - there was assumption that Adam Smith’s invisible hand worked so that people freed from working would find useful things to do with their lives. They became artists and inventors, doctors and poets, space explorers and entertainers.
Or, they just sat around and enjoyed the fruits of the new social order, kind of like some of the the children of our wealthy families do today.
So, let’s just say Andrew Yang is a politician (he is running for president, after all) who is a couple of centuries ahead of his time. I remember one Star Trek episode where the crew ended up in the past, and were shocked to find that people needed money to get things. “What is money?” I think one of them asked.
Well, I can already imagine someone from today going back to the 1940’s with nothing but a credit card in her wallet and trying to buy something in a store. “Chip or tap?,” she might ask. Explain that economy at the cash register.
Yes, Andrew Yang is a prophet ahead of his time. But, he won’t get beamed up to the White House.
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