Andrew Yang is selling snake oil to progressives. He’s selling a scam that will serve only to help tech executives sleep as they drive many millions into a new permanent underclass as they strip workers of their jobs.
At first glance, Yang’s idea of giving every adult in America $1,000 a month may seem like a good idea. It cannot be disputed that Yang has correctly identified a real threat to workers. As he pointed out in the last debate, robots and artificial intelligence are in the early stages of being deployed to eliminate the thing that business owners hate most — employee costs. We are at the top of a precipice that will transform and devastate our country faster and more certainly than climate change. Yang correctly noted in the last debate:
* “[W]e're in the midst of the greatest economic transformation in our history. Artificial intelligence is coming. It's going to displace hundreds of thousands of call center workers, and truck drivers -- the most common job in 29 states, including this one.”
* “We need to be laser-focused on solving the real challenges of today, like the fact that the most common jobs in America may not exist in a decade.”
* “We already automated away millions of manufacturing jobs, and chances are your job can be next. If you don't believe me, just ask an auto worker here in Detroit.”
* “The automation of our jobs is the central challenge facing us today.”
I must give kudos to Yang for identifying and talking about a MAJOR problem we are facing RIGHT NOW! I can’t blame anyone for thinking he is speaking truth in identifying this problem. In fact, he is correctly identifying the problem. He is speaking truth in highlighting the threat AI poses to workers.
But, he is not speaking truth to power.
It is not enough to identify a problem. The more important task is to solve it. And this is where Yang goes off the tracks and begins to mislead good progressives down an evil and unproductive path that leads to the creation of a permanent underclass of a magnitude never seen before.
You see, although Yang identifies that the problem is artificial intelligence being deployed to eliminate millions of the most common blue collar and “no college required” jobs in America, he does not advocate attacking the cause of that problem at all.
Instead, of proposing regulation which would preserve those jobs, and the basic dignity of workers, he instead advocates a solution which tolerates, and even enables, the permanent eradication of their jobs.
More specifically, instead of supporting regulations which would preclude the deployment of driverless cars and trucks, which he states will eradicate the single largest employment category in 29 states, Yang suggests that federal government instead give the millions who will be unemployed a “Universal Basic Income” of $1,000 a month.
WTF?
Since when is giving someone $1,000 a month to become unemployed a solution for taking away their $4,000 to $6,000 a month job (the average salary of a heavy truck driver)!?!
It’s not a solution at all.
So why does Yang advocate it? Because he is not a progressive. As he put it:
I'm building a coalition of disaffected Trump voters, independents, libertarians, and conservatives, as well as democrats and progressives.
He believes that businesses should not be burdened by pesky regulation. This is a guy who, in the same debate, advocated universal health care from the perspective of getting the health care burden off of the backs of businesses:
Democrats are talking about health care in the wrong way. As someone who's run a business, I can tell you flat out our current health care system makes it harder to hire, it makes it harder to treat people well and give them benefits and treat them as full-time employees, it makes it harder to switch jobs, as Senator Harris just said, and it's certainly a lot harder to start a business.
If we say, look, we're going to get health care off the backs of businesses and families, then watch American entrepreneurship recover and bloom. That's the argument we should be making to the American people.
This is the guy who advocated that the solution to the climate crisis was not taking government action, but putting money in the pockets of individuals:
And we can see it around it us this summer. The last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded history. This is going to be a tough truth, but we are too late. We are 10 years too late. We need to do everything we can to start moving the climate in the right direction, but we also need to start moving our people to higher ground.
And the best way to do that is to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.
And here’s the ugly truth: So-called Universal Basic Income is an idea pushed by tech executives to allow themselves free reign to eliminate employments costs by replacing workers with AI without facing the guilt that they are destroying the American Dream for millions by making them permanently unemployed. It is a program whose primary purpose is not to give the new permanent underclass a better life, but to give them a subsistence life style that will allow tech executives like Yang to sleep at night with the false feeling that they “helped” the people whose jobs they destroyed.
And, best of all, the cost is borne by the federal government, not the tech sector (which is strangely silent on who will pay for the UBI required by their actions).
UBI is a scam, and too many are falling for it. Amazon, Google, Lyft, Uber, etc. are all racing to see who can eliminate the most jobs the fastest.
It’s time to call out Yang and his ilk for pushing UBI as a cover for this abomination.
And it’s time for real progressives to speak in favor of preserving jobs, not business profits.
