Why not sit back, relax, kick your feet up, and...

I reject the entire premise of Yang's UBI, which is that it is a solution for dying towns and for the jobs lost to automation. Yang's "freedom dividend" is a solution in search of a problem.

First and foremost, small business hiring has stagnated recently because the employment market has been so good that small businesses are struggling to find employees to hire. There are countless millions of unfilled jobs. There may come a time in the future when AI-enhanced robotics replaces most human labor. At that point we really will have to consider a form of UBI, but we aren't even close to that point.

Secondly, Yang and Tucker Carlson are largely on the same page--that people in dying towns they grew up in have a right to stay where they are and to either have a good job or UBI while they are there. I hate that notion. I utterly hate it. Our nation was founded by pioneers who went off into a great wilderness and fought the natives and the elements and carved out an empire. Now we're telling people that they don't need to take a bus to the next town to find gainful employment--that it is not an individual's responsibility to dust off their feet and move on to new opportunity. I absolutely reject this. We are infantalizing adults and removing responsibility from them to manage their own lives. We need politicians to speak truth to people in dying towns--move on! Go seek out new adventures!

Then, on to the nuts and bolts. Even if I accepted the premises of UBI, it will cost in the order of $2-3 trillion per year, and it will be paid for by a lot of crazy assumptions from Team Yang, such as that economic growth from UBI will grow the economy so much that it will pay for UBI, and the economy will grow in the face of hundreds of billions of dollars of new tax increases. This is just a non-sensical policy delusion. The last thing the U.S. federal budget needs is another unfunded entitlement.

Finally, Yang makes a number of false parallels in order to sell UBI to conservatives. He says that UBI is basically a conservative idea and cites Milton Freedman's negative income tax. But a negative income tax is wildly different than UBI in how it is implemented and it is meant to fully replace the welfare state. Yang claims that Red State Alaska already has a UBI and it is wildly popular, but that's not really true--Alaska has profit sharing from its oil revenues, which averages about $1,000 per year per resident in dividends. But the number fluctuates wildly each year because the dividend is based on actual performance.

One other thing Yang doesn't really address even when asked directly about it--what prevents politicians from one-upping each other once there is a UBI? "He supports $1,000/month? Well, I support $2,000 per month UBI!" This is a real concern and requires the chief proponent to address. How do you prevent the UBI from becoming legalized bribery? We already have legalied bribery in Washington but UBI would encourage and exacerbate the problem since every voter has a direct interest in the UBI payment.