Andrew Yang’s UBI proposal has crossed my dash a few times in the past couple of weeks, so I thought I’d revisit it and see if he has added any substance to it since the last time I looked. (Previous posts on UBI can be found collected here.)

tl,dr: No. In fact, far from being serious, it’s bullshit.

The last time I checked Yang’s website, the plan to pay for UBI had two components: a 10% VAT, with no projected revenue amount, and a welfare substitution scheme, where any current recipient of welfare would have to choose between keeping their current benefits or accepting the UBI.

Now he has added two more components (look under “How would we pay for Universal Basic Income?”), and included some figures:

1. Current welfare spending is around $500 to $600 billion annually, and the UBI would replace some of that.

2. A 10% VAT is expected to bring in $800 billion.

3. The economic stimulus of the UBI is expected to raise tax revenues by $500-600 billion, citing a study by the Roosevelt Institute.

4. Savings from lower demand for health care, incarceration, homeless services and the like are expected to be $100-200 billion.

Before looking at how realistic those numbers are, let’s see how they stack up against the cost. Yang doesn’t include a price tag, but his plan is to give $1000 per month to every adult US citizen, so it’s easy to calculate. There are about 250 million adult US citizens, so the annual gross cost of Yang’s UBI is about $3 trillion. (My previous post calculated a gross cost of $2.4 trillion, but his plan at the time did not cover people age 65 or over.)

If we take the high end of all of Yang’s estimates, we get only $2.2 trillion, so there’s still quite a hole in the budget. Yang has absolutely nothing to say about this shortfall, which already shows that he’s not really trying to put together a serious plan. Things get worse when we look at each of the points above.

The main problem, because it undermines the rest of Yang’s case and shows that he isn’t serious about making one, is point 3. It’s difficult to avoid calling it dishonest. Here’s what’s Yang says on his website:

3. New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $500 – 600 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity.

Citing the Roosevelt Institute study is complete bullshit.

You can download the study here. Even if we take its conclusions to be realistic, it considers twelve different scenarios, and the $2.5 trillion boost to the economy results only from the scenario where the UBI is 100% financed with deficit spending. In the scenario where it’s tax-supported, they find that the economy increases only by about $500 billion.

The top two lines, scenarios 3 and 9, are the ones where they finance the UBI with budget deficits and ignore any downsides to accumulating all that debt. They figure that if you can get three trillion magical dollars from nowhere, you can boost the economy by $2.5 trillion. That’s not terribly useful information.

Scenarios 6 and 12, in red and black, assume a tax-funded UBI. In scenario 6, they followed their model and found that UBI has no effect on the economy. In scenario 12, they decided they didn’t like that result, so they adjusted the model to reflect the greater propensity of poorer households to spend their income (without taking into effect negative effects of the resulting lower savings rate).

That gave them a result of $500 billion a year, and unless Yang is planning on using magical money from nowhere, he has no business citing the $2.5 trillion figure. At best, the stimulus would be a fifth of that.

Yang’s UBI budget, therefore, should look like this:

And until he can explain where the missing $1.3 trillion is going to come from, he has no serious UBI plan.

But that’s assuming the Roosevelt Institute study is a good match for Yang’s plan in the first place. It’s not, for various reasons. Nikiforos et. al. modeled their tax revenue with an extension of existing income taxes, which would be progressive. Yang’s VAT is regressive, so a greater portion falls on poorer households, so there won’t be as much of a boost to consumer spending.

But even worse, Nikiforos et. al. modeled the effect of $3 trillion in additional spending. Yang’s point 1 above indicates that he is planning on reducing welfare spending, so he’s not adding $3 trillion in new money.

But even worse, one of Yang’s stated benefits of UBI directly contradicts one of the study’s assumptions. On p. 5, it is assumed that “Unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply.” Yang, on the other hand, says that “UBI increases art production, nonprofit work and caring for loved ones because it provides a supplementary income for those interested in labor that isn’t supported by the market.” If people are foregoing labor supported by the market, they’re earning less and paying less in taxes. Yang has no plan to replace that lost tax revenue.

So if the Roosevelt Institute study is such a poor fit for Yang’s plan, how did it end up on Yang’s website? Is no one checking to see if any of the claims he makes about UBI stand up to a few minutes of research?

Conclusion: Yang has been running for president for more than a year and not only has he failed to put forward a serious plan, he doesn’t even have a plausible outline for one.

Also: no one else does, either.