To some degree yes, at this point in the process, depending on the nature of the “attacks.” It is fair game for Ryan Liam to argue, as he does below, that he sees massive structural issues that require big and disruptive ideas to address, and to be dissatisfied with candidates who are not offering what he sees as those big disruptive ideas.
And it is fair game for others of us to point out how specific big disruptive ideas are not only not likely to fix the problems they are aimed at but may in fact make them much worse, or how specific big disruptive ideas may make great sales campaigns but have no chance of actually happening.
You of course are free to think what you want but being a pragmatic incrementalist ≠ retaining the status quo as much as possible.
And indeed those candidates are less about the disruptive big idea than movement in the right directions that won’t cause more harms than goods and that can be delivered and not just promised. And being able to win. Failing gloriously is, IMHO, not preferable to succeeding only well.
Beto’s getting sidelined because he is seeming to be more hat than cattle. Buttigieg will likely get sidelined too but will succeed in setting his stage for future accomplishments. Yang (and this is his thread) won’t get off the sideline to begin with but he will likely succeed in getting UBI talked about some during the debates.
On Anderson Cooper 360, a reporter went to sit with 8 Democratic voters to talk about their thoughts about Joe Biden as he entered the race. 3 people said they’d vote for Biden. 2 people mentioned Yang. They didn’t say they’d vote for him, just that he had some interesting ideas.
Tucker Carlson talked about Yang on a show on Fox News where he was the supposed guest. Tucker talked about how Yang was the only candidate on either side who was talking about what he thought was the major issue affecting the country, which is automation. He also gives props to Tulsi Gabbard for an issue and laughs about the media fawning over Beto and Buttigieg.
I thought this interview on Fox Nation right after the LA rally was pretty amusing. Nothing novel about the questions, but there was a guy in the background moving the Yangbill behind them. The last question the interviewer asked was what are the YangGang colors. Yang said they were red, white and blue based on the Math hat (Make America Think Harder) that the interviewer just asked about. Yang spoke about how he’s looking forward to Trump making up a nickname for him.
From 538, We Asked Democratic Activists Who They’re Backing — And Who They’d Hate To See Win on April 22, 2019. Yang has a 9% share of activists who are considering him. Yang had a 35% share of activists who would NOT consider him, tied with McAuliffe, who is already out. Beating Yang is Delaney with a 38% share, Biden with a 42% share, Bernie with a 50% share, and Tulsi with a 58% share.
Nate Silver on twitter a couple days ago, referencing the whole thing with Trump and Hillary back in 2016 about taco trucks on every corner.
There was a bit of controversy a couple days ago. USA Today put out a poll asking which Presidential candidates people were talking about. Yang, Bernie and Marianne Williamson topped the list. USA Today put out an article sharing the results of the poll and some essays they’d received about the candidates. Later, they put out an article saying that polls like this can be suspect, even though it’s their own poll.
But he’d only be a liar if he was committed to VAT being the only solution to the problem of Amazon paying its tax, so you seem to be strawmanning VAT into a be all and end all solution to this problem, which Yang through his policies himself has said isn’t the case. Sounds like you’re lying here bud.
That ‘regressive tax’ Which I’ve been over and over and over in this thread, is subjective considering the tax on consumption would help fund social programmes designed to alleviate poverty, such as free healthcare, if it was that terrible, the UK would of abandoned it decades ago, but we haven’t, wonder why that is?
Bernie is a pragmatic incrementalist, your definition is akin to plate tectonics.
Rubbish, the UK after WWII instituted free healthcare, and this was when it was virtually bankrupt, the US can do the same thing. There’s no excuse.
I just don’t get it. You’ve been shown that a VAT is not going get Amazon to pay more taxes at all. A VAT, in the end, is a consumer tax. It’s lying to say it’s even a small part of the solution.
It’s not weird. This is the last time I’m going to try and explain your buddy’s plan to you. From investopedia
So you can see, the cost of the VAT is handed down at each step so the end user is the only one paying. Big companies would only really pay VAT on things not part of their core business/supply chain.
They’re inextricably linked, VAT is used in part to finance UBI, come on now, you can do better than that.
You’ve failed to explain the first time, this being after I told you numerous times that framing the VAT tax plan as the be all and end all of his making tech giants to pay fair tax is disingenious.
Big companies pay big taxes, and VAT is most effective on high end purchases which alot of businesses do.
As for the consumer, the end user isn’t the only one paying, at each step of the supply chain the tax is already paid for. If a company levies a marginal (And it is marginal) Higher price for the end user, then it’s still fairer than sales tax because whilst there’s no guarantee a consumer will buy the product, the resources to make and produce such product will have been already taxed.
Following on from the previous day’s tweet, the next day the tweet was about how drones were being used to plant new trees faster than it was done in the past.
A piece of land in Myanmar is being used to test whether drones could successfully plant trees by firing seed missiles into the ground. Less than a year later, there has been success. Not only would it help with climate change, but it would also help curb land erosion. It takes two operators to man the drones. This is another area where automation is displacing human effort with a positive result in productivity.
Some twitter pictures of Yang’s campaigning in Iowa. I’m liking that there are more women and more diversity in ages in these pictures. Also some nice pictures of the rally crowds from Yang’s campaign manager’s twitter feed.
Yang is polling at 2% in New Hampshire. One of the YangGang noticed something interesting about this poll. Yang is second to Bernie in winning over voters who didn’t vote in 2016. In most of Yang’s recent rallies, they’ve asked the crowd whether anyone in the crowd was caring about politics for the first time. There have been quite a number of people in his rallies responding to that.
This is the reason that polls are not always effective. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notes in her interview with Stephen Colbert, polls measure who the pollsters think are likely to turn up to vote. AOC changed who turned up to vote. That made the difference for her. But that was only about 10-20K people. I don’t know if it would work on a national level.
I found this hilarious, but maybe it was one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments. I saw the title of the post, Look who wasn’t omitted off the list! There has been a lot of discussion about how MSM and particularly MSNBC have left Yang off all their graphics, so I thought that this was a MSNBC graphic that was finally corrected. When I opened the post, I found that it was a list from an (https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/1121873861186936838) sent by the Trump campaign sent to his supporters to vote in a straw poll about which 2020 candidate is the worst. Trump is looking for who to hate on next. The pictures they chose for that email are comical. At least Yang made it to the list. There were some other candidates who were left off that list. I bet Yang would be proud.
I was looking for poll information on UBI. I found one that showed a split in the US about UBI. Young people wanted it while older people didn’t. Democrats wanted it while Republicans didn’t. Women wanted it more than men. The crowds showing up for the rallies aren’t indicative of this yet. This poll was taken in the latter half of 2017.
For people who like to play in the math, here are some calculations of the Freedom Dividend. Here are some of the source studies.
Yeah, such as VAT being collected at each point of production, rather than it all being dumped on the consumer via a sales tax. That kind of straightforward? Or how about the kind of straightforward where it’s harder to dodge paying VAT in comparison to sales tax?
You don’t see that the VAT is recouped by the manufacturer and retailer when the product gets to the consumer. Don’t know why but that is your essential misunderstanding, if you want to work through it on your own.
The contrast between how the Left and Right media cover Yang has become so stark, people are beginning to wonder if the Right is being ironic. But I guess that could be said of the Left in the opposite direction.
Here’s an author from The Federalist in an opinion piece in the Orange County Register:
On the Left, here’s a piece of the discussion from 538 and Yang’s chances to have a “moment”:
I watched a coupleyoutube videos of behind the scenes stuff of Yang’s campaign. Again, I’m impressed with how much energy goes into campaigning. After the rally, there’s the compulsory selfie requirement that people stay for. One guy asked during the town hall if Yang would stay to take pictures. Yang promised to stay until everyone who wanted a picture had one. After that, there’s the meeting with the donors and the volunteers who helped put together the rally. More picture taking, some behind the scenes information sharing and some personal question and answer.
I’m also impressed that before and after Yang’s rally in LA with thousands of people, Yang took the time to be interviewed by completely unknown youtube channels. He gave them the same time and attention that he did with every media interview, big or small. He might run out of time for that in the future, but it was really nice of him to do.
Nice blog piece from a guy who was at his Iowa rally. He says that he’s switching from Bernie to Yang. The piece reminded me that the rally had 6 people dressed up as penguins to protest what they thought was Yang’s policy on climate change. Yang has said that when people have the financial boot on their throats, they might say that the penguins can wait. That doesn’t mean that Yang himself doesn’t see the urgency, just that people who are worried about paying their bills may not have the bandwidth to worry about it. So his first priority is to take the financial weight off, then those people might be able to mobilize more. After Yang explained, the penguins seemed happy with what they heard, clapping and smiling.
More and more, the Yang subreddit is seeing other candidates with Yang policies, taken almost verbatim from his website, things like democracy dollars and UBI explained exactly as Yang does. People are of two minds about that. On the one hand, people realize that it’s the ideas that need to spread. It doesn’t matter who is spreading them. On the other hand, there’s something about taking without giving credit that rubs people the wrong way. It’s probably a testament to the campaign that other candidates think the ideas are worth putting out there. Emerson polling in Texas had Yang at 3.2% with 9.1% of the 18-29 year olds.
On a C-Span interview Cenk Uygur mentioned that TYT will be hosting another interview with Yang in a week or so. I haven’t heard that from the Yang camp yet.
Yang is set to rally in Seattle, WA on Friday, May 3, 2019.
