Moderate Left Bias

This article has moderate left bias with a bias score of -33.46 from our political bias detecting A.I.

Janet Ybarra Democrat Former Washington Journalist Contributor on The Bipartisan Press

Entrepreneur and quixotic presidential candidate Andrew Yang may have finally exited the race, but one of his top supporters in California has laid groundwork to very much keep Yang’s signature cause very much alive.

California state Assemblymember Evan Low, who served as a co-chair of Yang’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, has introduced legislation which would enact a universal basic income (UBI) scheme on the state level which looks very much like the Freedom Dividend which propelled Yang’s race–particularly in its early going.

So the good part of this is that it would implement a plan, in real life, very much on the order of what Yang preached: offering Californians $1,000 per month, paid for with a state value-added tax of 10 percent on goods and services, with exemptions for groceries, medicine, medical supplies, clothing, textbooks and some other items.

Okay, so we covered what’s great about this new plan.

Now for where it goes terribly wrong.

Recipients of several programs, including the state’s Medicaid plan, would be ineligible.

Here’s where this is bad:

Why are you going to put those who rely upon the safety net off-limits from UBI? It would seem to be one more chance to stigmatize and criminalize the poor. And those relying on the safety net are often the working poor. Don’t they deserve the same consideration? If UBI is to be a give-away to only the middle and upper middle classes, how can we say that we are genuinely addressing income inequality? Even if the authors of this legislation could point to legitimate reasons to keep those Californians who rely on safety net programs away from this UBI, Medicaid is a particularly lousy example to use. Why? Because post-Obamacare, the Medicaid expansion allows coverage for not only the poor but those who–depending on circumstances–might even be considered lower middle class.

All-in-all, California legislators are taking what is supposed to be a broad help across the economy, and fashioning it as another giveaway to those who may need it the least.

Is this really what Andrew Yang intended?

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