Is Andrew Yang getting interesting? The mayoral leader has recently developed a habit of making reasonable, if rather grand, suggestions on how to run Gotham – and it’s driving his rivals crazy. Yang has not proven he is ready to run for mayor, but his competitors’ unhinged reactions to even the most obvious of ideas show that he is not.
Yang’s least interesting or constructive idea is his signature problem: universal basic income. Last year, he ran for president by giving every adult in America $ 1,000 a month. The idea is to give the poor a choice of what to do with their money, instead of giving them vouchers for housing, food and so on. UBI gives everyone else a weapon against wage stagnation and the automation and offshoring of jobs.
The Big Apple cannot give every adult $ 1,000 monthly. It would cost $ 80 billion a year, more than tax revenue. So, Yang offers a stripped-down version of his “universal” plan: $ 167 a month for the poorest half a million New Yorkers. But he never explains the most important details.
Ignore the UBI though, and Yang has other helpful ideas. Last week, he suggested that the city should not impose taxes on top earners because it could expel them. ‘When you levy taxes. Where people actually vote with their feet and go to Florida, you don’t serve the purpose of the policy, ”he told the Association for a Better New York.
Yang also suggested the city would consider incentives to lure suburban workers who haven’t been at their Manhattan desks for a year to give commuting another chance. This too is worth a try: why not give people vouchers to travel on the commuter train with an expiration date in a few months, so those who are bored at home try to take a trip to the city? (Yang rival and city warden Scott Stringer predictably accused him of practicing “municipal Reaganomics.”)
Yang also suggested that Mayor Bill de Blasio is not spending the full $ 6 billion on emergency relief that we are getting from the FBI. Since the city could face years of shortages, Yang said, it would be wise to squirrel away 70 percent.
This is sensible – but another rival, former Blasio legal counsel Maya Wiley, attacked him. “Our city deserves a serious leader, not a mini-Trump,” her spokeswoman said. Huh?
Eric Adams, the president of the Brooklyn borough, didn’t need a policy rationale to take on Yang. At an event that saw a union acceptance – where he should have been in a good mood – Adams said that “people like Andrew Yang” “have never had a job in [their] whole life. You don’t go to this town and think you’re going to ignore the people. ”
Yang is a lawyer. He has worked at startups, managed a school testing company, and founded and managed a nonprofit organization that trained people to become entrepreneurs in troubled cities. He has always had a job. And he’s lived in New York for a quarter of a century.
What is behind the attacks is that the insiders are afraid of the outsider.
The insiders’ bet is that Yang’s frontrunner status will disappear if voters pay attention. Yang has about 16 percent of the vote, followed closely by Adams. Half of the voters remain undecided.
But the idea that people will suddenly learn who Stringer and Adams are and get excited about them is rather weak. And as the latest Fontas Advisors survey shows, people – 85 percent – know who Yang is.
But they also know who Stringer and Adams are, at 64 and 62 percent. At 42 percent, Wiley has room to introduce herself. The others don’t.
Stringer and Adams are also being threatened by other low-profile candidates. Ray McGuire was an investment banker throughout his career; Kathryn Garcia headed the Sanitation Department. Only a third of voters know who they are. When voters learn, they may be happy with what they see by cutting the undecided.
The last joker: votes in order of choice. Sure, Adams and Stringer were able to fight each other for a few votes, only to see everyone split their first choice between them, then chose Yang, the affable Yankees game contestant, as their second choice, putting him on the top. stand.
Yang’s critics are not entirely wrong: he shows an unpleasant lack of familiarity with the city government, and some of his ideas – like building a casino on Governors Island – are just weird and silly. But for voters who want change in a crisis, his well-known big rivals are too familiar with the government.
Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal Contributing Editor.
Twitter: @NicoleGelinas