What's going to happen
is robots will be able to do everything better than us.
I mean, all of us, you know.
I'm not sure exactly what to do about this.
Tech billionaire, Elon Musk
isn't the only one freaking out
over our new robot overlords.
Fears of automation induced mass unemployment
are at the center of a push for a universal basic income
or UBI in which the government sends everyone
a monthly check, regardless of wealth.
Though the idea has been kicking around for centuries,
it really caught fire recently because of Andrew Yang
who ran for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 2020,
and to be mayor of New York in 2021.
His new memoir and political party both called "Forward"
put UBI at the center of his agenda.
Last year, polls showed a majority favoring the idea,
and cities like Los Angeles, Saint Paul, Atlanta,
and Newark are experimenting with or considering local UBIs.
Yang says cash payments are better than government programs
for the same reason
that the libertarian economist, Milton Friedman,
advocated slashing social welfare
in favor of direct subsidies to the poor
because it's more effective to put unrestricted cash,
directly in the hands of those who need it.
This is one thing that I believe
I'm fundamentally aligned with libertarians on.
It's like I think people know best
how to solve their own problems and what they need.
Than a government program,
I think that a lot of these bureaucracies
are very inefficient.
They're also somewhat punitive
where I talked to people who are subject to them
and they live in fear
and anxiety all the time
that they're going to fill out a form wrong
or miss an interview,
and then have it taken away from them.
I really like Andrew Yang's disposition,
his refusal to engage in the dumbest cultural war skirmishes
and his willingness to call out Republicans and Democrats.
But I think he's wrong to claim
that a UBI wouldn't do massive damage
to American labor markets and the federal balance sheet.
During the pandemic, the government shelled out
for three rounds of stimulus checks
to about 90% of households,
including sending money to the well-to-do
and it supplemented unemployment benefits
by as much as $600 a week.
One of the negatives of this time in my mind, Nick,
is that we're tying so much of the money to not working.
You know, like I talked to a 25 year old young person
who is getting 500-600 bucks a week
and he said like, "look, I'm not going to look for a job
until this trading runs out."
Yang says that an advantage of a UBI
is that it's not tied to employment status.
But I think giving people money for nothing
would make them less likely to show up
for a hard day's work.
The number of job openings in the United States
has reached historic highs
even as the labor force participation rate,
the percentage of working age adults who either have jobs
or are looking for work
is almost two points lower than before the pandemic began.
Here's another problem with the UBI,
why should middle-class Americans,
not to mention millionaires and billionaires,
get a check from the government just for being alive?
Making it universal has many benefits.
It reduces any stigma,
it makes it a true right of citizenship,
it gets rid of all of the administration and game-playing,
no one's going to be having to misrepresent
what their financial circumstances are.
I'm not a big fan of a lot of the means testings
because of both the administration
and the game playing that goes on.
We miss a lot of people every time we try and draw lines.
Maybe Yang is right that giving everyone a check
would make the program easier to administer.
But does billionaire Elon Musk really need
even more taxpayer money than he's already raking in?
Such largess is particularly hard to defend
given that the federal budget has cracked $6 trillion
in each of the past two years,
and the national debt is approaching $30 trillion.
When he was running for president,
Yang said the costs of giving every American citizen,
a monthly check would be partly covered by phasing out
certain amounts of existing spending.
Something that virtually never happens.
And even sympathetic analysis of his plan noted
that its costs would soak up
all existing federal tax revenues
resulting in either massive deficits,
or humongous new tax hikes.
Senator Warren,
I've been talking to Americans around the country
about automation and they're smart.
They see what's happening around them.
Their main street stores are closing.
They see a self-serve kiosk in every McDonald's,
every grocery store, every CVS.
In fact, historically game-changing innovations
haven't reduced the total number of jobs.
For all the talk about the sudden disruptive loss
of good paying industrial jobs,
the fact is that manufacturing peaked at around 40%
of all employment in 1943, since then,
it's been a steady uninterrupted decline over decades.
And yet there's been no shortage of work opportunities
in new industries.
Driving a truck is the most common job in 29 states,
including this one.
Three and a half million truck drivers in this country,
and my friends in California
are piloting self-driving trucks.
Self driving cars, displacing truck drivers
and delivery men are likely decades away.
And those productivity gains
will one day enable entrepreneurs
to create whole new industries
with work opportunities not yet conceived.
Even in industries directly impacted by automation,
the result is often more jobs rather than fewer.
There are some structural issues with our economy,
where a lot of businesses
have learned to become much more efficient,
with a lot fewer workers.
You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM,
you don't go to a bank teller.
Obama's analysis is wrong.
After banks rolled at ATM's in the 1990s,
the number of bank tellers increased in the ensuing decades.
And in the years after supermarkets
and retailers introduced barcode scanning,
the number of cashiers increased by more than 50%.
Andrew Yang's UBI
isn't going to be implemented anywhere anytime soon,
but enhanced unemployment benefits are going away.
So we'll soon find out whether getting less money
from the government spurs more people to go look for work.
If and when they do,
job seekers we'll find an economy
where employers are begging for help
and offering unprecedented incentives from appetizers,
to signing bonuses, to free tuition,
to get people to start punching a clock again.
That's not Andrew Yang's way forward,
but it has the benefit of reducing dependency on the state
re-energizing the labor market
and not making the government even more broke,
than it already is.