Will the monthly stipend for citizens be based on economic factors, or poll numbers?

It was with visible and audible excitement that Morning Joe hosts MikA Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough announced that they would be welcoming any and all Democratic Presidential hopefuls on their program ahead of the 2020. This of course differs slightly from the run-up to 2016, when Donald Trump appeared on their show multiple times a week en route to earning the GOP nomination. (We have not forgotten, you swooning lovebirds!)

This morning they invited on their coffee clatch Andrew Yang, who recently qualified via verified donor lists, to be included in the Democratic field of candidates. Yang has a new proposal to combat the threat of automation in the workforce, which he says led to a Trump victory in 2016 due to millions who were placed out of work. His solution: pay people to not work.

To combat this reality he proposes a plan that would be “moving forward”, by paying out a stipend to all citizens. Dubbing it a “freedom dividend” (not redistribution, mind you) Yang is proposing “Every adult in America – starting at age 18 – would receive $1,000 a month, free and clear, to do whatever they want.” This is sounding rather similar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing in her Green New Deal that people receive a living wage if they are “unable or unwilling to work”.

He likened our current economy transforming technologically as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it is going to be “three to four times faster and more vicious than the industrial revolution at the beginning of the 20th century.” The industrial revolution, understand, did not elevate and expand our nation to the degree of becoming a global superpower — it was vicious, according to Yang.

When he was asked about where this $1,000 allowance for citizens would derive Andrew Yang had dubious solution. He states the cost for his giveaway would be $1.8 trillion dollars, and he added a telling little phrase with that; “past current expenses”. But of course, as in all the Democratic economic unicorn dreams, this money is already readily available.

After making the farcical claim that Amazon, for instance, paid zero dollars in taxes last year, he proposed the Value Added Tax to fund his giveaway scheme. He then states that by imposing these fees on the major corporations at half of the European VAT levels would $800 billion in new revenue.

Uh, Andy? Mr. Scarborough referred to you as a numbers guy. What you just proposed means you are coming in $1 trillion below your stated budget cost, and if you doubled the rate to the European levels you still come up hundreds of billions of dollars short. Additionally, the companies will never pay these taxes, the customers will through higher prices. So after whatever chunk is chewed up by the government bureaucracy that payout will be going to those higher prices, so you essentially break even — but hey, we have the tidy gift of inflation as a bonus!

Understand that Yang is essentially campaigning off of what he viewed as “Trump Country” in 2016, those disaffected white blue collar types who harbor an anger. He wants to curb that segment from entrenching in 2020 by effectively buying their votes. He exposed his mindset on this demographic this past December at a conference where he declared that the next group to be threatened by violence in this nation will be the Asian community.

Speaking at an event entitled “A Glance at US Politics from Asian Americans” Yang insisted that in a generation we will see what he described as a “shrinking, insecure white majority” losing jobs to China begin to target Chinese Americans and Asian Americans.

I think we’re one generation away from falling into the same camps as that the Jews who were attacked in a synagogue in Pittsburgh like just a couple months [ago]. So we’re probably one generation away from an American shooting up a bunch of Asians saying like, damn the Chinese, because there’s a giant Cold War even more with China. That is the great danger that I fear that my children are going to grow up in.

Andrew Yang seems to enjoy operating in platitudes and not actually looking into details. If he wants to attribute the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to Trump followers he is doing so without having looked at the facts of that tragedy. The killer, Robert Bowers, openly despised President Trump, specifically because he was so friendly with Jews and Israel. Therefore the shooter was far more aligned with the likes of Ilhan Omar and the anti-Semitic faction of Yang’s own party.

But that simply means that Yang is content to go with sweeping generalizations of large groups of people. He is going to fit in just fine with the others standing beside him on those stages in the coming months.