NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
He's running! NYCUBIFTW!
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Unofficial Yang for NY Mayor. Update: Yang no longer a Dem (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter NorvilleBarnes
- Start date
Lutherman2112
Footballguy
Can't wait to follow your interest from Florida. "Florida Man Hangs From Yang's Wang!"
Alex P Keaton
Footballguy
Very much on board for this.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Heck, I'd even vote for Yang as long as we can get the current idiot out of there. Dude is straight up Communist, IMO.
Matt Yglasias:
New Yang City
How to transform NYC into a UBI paradise
Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York City, and through the weird happenstance of our times, it seems likely that he’s going to emerge as the Great Moderate Hope in a sea of progressive contenders. That includes hiring Bradley Tusk, one of Michael Bloomberg’s campaign managers, to consult for him.
I think we probably know what a neo-Bloombergian campaign looks like, and it probably doesn’t involve advocacy for a municipal-level universal basic income. And that, in turn, is probably for the best since I think Yang’s presidential campaign had a lot of appealing qualities, but his whole automation schtick is wrong.
I think UBI could be a promising theme for a mayoral campaign, though. Not because of automation, but because of the fiscal situation in New York. The city finds itself faced with a pandemic-induced budget crisis and clearly needs to rethink a thing or two; it also appears to collect far more in per person taxes (about $8,427 in 2017) than other large, heavily Democratic cities such as Los Angeles ($4,692), Chicago ($4,668), and Boston ($4,270) without offering public services that seem commensurately superior. And these other cities are not exactly low-tax jurisdictions.
The standard conservative prescription for this sort of thing is that cities should clamp down on spending (mostly at the expense of public sector workers) and reduce taxes. But especially in a city like New York, the politics of pitting billionaires against teachers, firefighters, garbagemen, and cops are not very compelling. Instead, the city could continue collecting taxes at a high level (after all, billionaires, commuters, and tourists are paying a large share of the taxes) but reduce spending to efficient levels and pay the surplus out to citizens as a kind of mini-UBI.
The big city business model
There’s a perennial cliche where some businessman type says that if you put him in charge, he could fix everything by running the government like a business. And then there’s a perennial counter-cliché where someone explains that the government is nothing like a business.
But I actually do think there’s a sense in which local government is kind of like a business.
A local government, for starters, is financially constrained — it can’t just run big open-ended deficits. And local governments need to compete with other localities for tax base. And most of all, local governments mostly spend money on the direct provision of services in a way that creates feedback to the tax base. People pay good money to live in towns with quality school systems, so an investment in better schools could “pay for itself” by boosting tax revenues. There’s an idea called Tiebout Competition, which holds that for exactly this reason, different localities will compete against each other to offer the optimal combination of tax rates and service levels. And while that’s obviously not exactly how anything works, I do think it at least approximately characterizes the functioning of America’s suburban jurisdictions.
But big cities are different.
The lucky ones, like New York, are heirs to industry clusters that create value. Others, like Miami, benefit from good weather and proximity to beaches. Los Angeles has both. Essentially all cities attract commuters and people who visit for the nightlife and entertainment amenities without actually living there. To an extent, all those transients increase costs (they use the transportation infrastructure, the fire department needs to deal with them, etc). But on net, they are clear contributors: they don’t send their kids to school, for starters, and police and fire needs mostly scale with land area rather than population.
Now, of course, there are also unlucky cities like Detroit or Cleveland, which have seen their one-time industrial base evaporate and are now locked in a cycle of population decline. The problems facing these cities are very serious and you can find extensive discussion of that in One Billion Americans. Suffice it to say this discussion is not about places like that.
The lucky cities, if you didn’t know anything about politics or the real world, might be expected to follow a “business model” in which they have lower tax rates than suburban jurisdictions since they can milk the surplus generated by the central business district to maintain equally good services. Of course, that’s not really what happens. Instead, big cities attract a lot of residents with left-wing political commitments who tolerate higher levels of taxation. That surplus is then spent on more generous welfare programs and public sector jobs.
The fiscal picture in New York
Up until the pandemic, the basic business model of New York was working really well.
Demand for living in the city was both high and rising, as witnessed by high and rising housing costs. New York’s population was shrinking before the pandemic, which sounds bad. But note, again, that this was not due to falling demand (which would show up in falling prices). Instead, rising demand for NYC living was bidding up prices to the point where the number of people living there was falling. From a business model standpoint, this is good. Instead of a working-class family of four occupying a two-bedroom apartment, you might have a Dual Income No Kids professional couple that both pays more in taxes (dines out more, etc.) and consumes less in public services (no school).
Now it turns out that to actually compare different American cities’ tax situations is very challenging because American cities differ considerably in their basic functions — Los Angeles and Chicago are inside their respective counties, while Philadelphia and Jacksonville are counties, New York encompasses five counties, and Columbus encompasses parts of three different counties.
The good news is that the Lincoln Land Institute has done the hard work of creating Fiscally Standardized Cities — i.e., you look at all the local government functions that happen inside the boundaries of the city — so that you can make meaningful comparisons. Then, you can look at tax revenue across the fifteen largest Fiscally Standardized Cities (recall these are municipalities, not metro areas) and see that New York has a lot of tax revenue.
[graph]
That was the situation as of 2017, at any rate. I should be clear: about $650 of that revenue is due to New York State’s unique system of forcing local governments to contribute to the state’s Medicaid program. Still, even accounting for Medicaid, New York takes in more money per resident than any of the other biggest cities.
Today, New York is facing a huge budget hole caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. If that turns out to be because of one-off losses of tax revenue due to reduced commuting, food sales, and entertainment during 2020, then the city will clearly find a way to cope. But the risk for New York is that a year-long experiment in remote working seems likely to create a structural reduction in demand for Manhattan office space. Not that the city’s main business precincts are about to become ghost towns out of I Am Legend, it’s just that they are going to become cheaper. Some companies will decide they don’t need the expense, and landlords will need to cut prices to tempt in some new tenants who were previously priced out. This could also create a structural decline in the demand for New York housing when people who previously needed to live in NYC don’t need to anymore, now that their job is permanently partially (or fully) remote.
On a lot of levels, I think a cheaper New York will be welcome. In 2003, Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit proclaimed his city “poor but sexy” (i.e., affordable to artists and cool people) and there’s really something to that. Coolness often emerges in urban areas as a result of a negative economic shock. When people say they want to “keep Austin weird,” they are recalling a specific moment in the city’s life associated with a Texas real estate bust. And an exodus of businesses from Montreal due to Québec’s language policies set the stage for an indie rock boom.
But in basic fiscal terms, it’s a problem.
New York has been parceling out the surplus to local government workers during the pre-pandemic boom, and that’s not sustainable if the city stops booming. Here’s an eye-opening chart from Eric Kober at the Manhattan Institute:
[graph]
And that’s just wages. Teacher benefits in New York are 69 percent more costly per pupil than in Boston, the second-costliest big city, and more than double any other large school district (the way the city’s own budget data works, they record “pensions and fringe benefits” as 18 percent of city spending). That kind of thing is only sustainable if property tax revenue keeps growing faster than inflation, which it no longer is.
Pay the surplus out to people
Conservatives will look at these facts, shake their heads at the profligacy of America’s big cities, and curse the evils of public sector unions (except police unions, where left and right will switch their opinions). But by the same token, conservatives don’t live or vote in big cities like New York, so it doesn’t matter what they think. As long as the city’s economy is doing well, it’s fairly easy for unions to beat landlords and billionaires in a pitched fight for the use of the city’s fiscal resources.
And during the Bill de Blasio era, the idea that the city needed to worry about its competitiveness would’ve seemed particularly risible to the electorate.
If New York finds itself in an acute fiscal crisis, the voters may have no choice but to do what conservatives want, but it seems like a shame for a city to ricochet between profligacy and austerity without a middle ground as a city that’s generous without being wasteful.
A more durable commitment might be to say that the city wants to get spending under control, and then if revenues grow in the future, the default will be to pay the money out as UBI checks to its citizens. That doesn’t mean you can never raise spending. But it does mean that the question of higher spending — whether that’s higher salaries or a subway expansion or anything else — becomes the question of “would you rather have this thing or would you rather have more money?” That application of a cash alternative is a natural source of political discipline.
Some math:
[graph]
That said, if New York managed to cut its revenue needs down to median Fiscally Standardized City, it would free up $45 billion per year in extra money! That’s not enough for Yang’s $12,000 a year UBI, but it would be enough to give every adult US citizen in New York $9,242 per year.
Grow the surplus
Of course, this is all a bit fanciful. But as a way of thinking about urban policy, I think it could be constructive. For example, while it’s basically impossible to get directly comparable data on mass transit spending, obviously New York City is maintaining a giant transit system that other places don’t have. If you combine state and local money, New York State spends $1,121 per person per year on transit, which is way more than Massachusetts, the third-highest state, with its $505 per person per year. But in this case, you really are getting a more robust transit network.
But as I detailed in “Fixing The Mass Transit Crisis,” it’s not like all this money is going to super useful services — they use two-person crews to operate subway trains and multiple conductors on commuter rail. Basically nowhere in the world does the former, and none of the high-performing regional rail systems in Europe or Asia do the latter. The MTA is also paying 30 percent more than Boston’s MBTA per passenger mile of bus service. For that matter, there’s also the question of fares. Right now, fares are a source of revenue, but they’re not set at a revenue-maximizing level. That’s in part because extra revenue gets captured by the workforce and in part because it’s seen as a social service benefit to low-income people. If you’re living in the UBI city, you try to maximize the efficiency of your labor arrangements and maximize the farebox revenue, and then the surplus kicks out to the public and that’s what protects low-income people.
My obsession, obviously, is with housing.
New York could easily generate more market-rate construction by rezoning. Even with prices falling due to the pandemic shock to demand, New York remains more expensive than the average American city, and the price of housing is above replacement costs. Right now, market-rate construction doesn’t make a big fiscal contribution to the city because builders get the 421-a tax exemption. But that, in turn, is tied up with parking requirements, the city’s effort to get in-kind payments in the form of affordable housing, rules discouraging the use of cranes (this creates extra jobs but raises costs), and other regulations. It’s such an ouroboros of rent-seeking that it’s not really in the interests of a typical New York voter to try to unlock the potential economic surplus here. If you untangle one bit, it’ll just flow to someone else.
But in the UBI City, you scrap the tax exemption and take a hard look at regulatory barriers to building. More buildings —> more property tax revenue (and when the residents move in, more sales and income tax revenue, too) —> more UBI money for you.
UBI City everywhere?
I don’t think this necessarily works as a general formula for urban governance. The whole point here is that New York is collecting an unusually large amount of tax revenue. But it is worth saying that San Francisco — the New York of the West — collects even more revenue per capita, seems to me to have worse public services, is also facing a potentially large post-pandemic shock to its tax base, and is better supplied than NYC with tech industry UBI enthusiasts.
But if a big UBI-centric push for economic government did take off in those two cultural flagship cities, that could help encourage the Seattles and Bostons and DCs of the world to take a harder look at their own business model.
Most American cities, unfortunately, are not lucky enough to have the problems of New York or San Francisco.
Sunbelt cities are actively competing with each other to try and grow, and we have lots of Rust Belt cities fighting, often unsuccessfully, to stave off decline. New York looms so large in our media consciousness that NYC problems sometimes get mistaken for “city problems” in a way that doesn’t make sense. Philadelphia is going to be suffering some kind of negative hit to demand for Center City office space, and it’s going to need to navigate that without the fiscal buffers that New York and San Francisco enjoy.
So don’t take any of this too seriously. But I do think that everyone knows urban governance is broken in the United States, and the same-old-same-old isn’t going to fix it. I’m not a particular UBI enthusiast in general, but it’s an interesting framework for thinking about these problems and possibly creating a new path forward.
New Yang City
How to transform NYC into a UBI paradise
Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York City, and through the weird happenstance of our times, it seems likely that he’s going to emerge as the Great Moderate Hope in a sea of progressive contenders. That includes hiring Bradley Tusk, one of Michael Bloomberg’s campaign managers, to consult for him.
I think we probably know what a neo-Bloombergian campaign looks like, and it probably doesn’t involve advocacy for a municipal-level universal basic income. And that, in turn, is probably for the best since I think Yang’s presidential campaign had a lot of appealing qualities, but his whole automation schtick is wrong.
I think UBI could be a promising theme for a mayoral campaign, though. Not because of automation, but because of the fiscal situation in New York. The city finds itself faced with a pandemic-induced budget crisis and clearly needs to rethink a thing or two; it also appears to collect far more in per person taxes (about $8,427 in 2017) than other large, heavily Democratic cities such as Los Angeles ($4,692), Chicago ($4,668), and Boston ($4,270) without offering public services that seem commensurately superior. And these other cities are not exactly low-tax jurisdictions.
The standard conservative prescription for this sort of thing is that cities should clamp down on spending (mostly at the expense of public sector workers) and reduce taxes. But especially in a city like New York, the politics of pitting billionaires against teachers, firefighters, garbagemen, and cops are not very compelling. Instead, the city could continue collecting taxes at a high level (after all, billionaires, commuters, and tourists are paying a large share of the taxes) but reduce spending to efficient levels and pay the surplus out to citizens as a kind of mini-UBI.
The big city business model
There’s a perennial cliche where some businessman type says that if you put him in charge, he could fix everything by running the government like a business. And then there’s a perennial counter-cliché where someone explains that the government is nothing like a business.
But I actually do think there’s a sense in which local government is kind of like a business.
A local government, for starters, is financially constrained — it can’t just run big open-ended deficits. And local governments need to compete with other localities for tax base. And most of all, local governments mostly spend money on the direct provision of services in a way that creates feedback to the tax base. People pay good money to live in towns with quality school systems, so an investment in better schools could “pay for itself” by boosting tax revenues. There’s an idea called Tiebout Competition, which holds that for exactly this reason, different localities will compete against each other to offer the optimal combination of tax rates and service levels. And while that’s obviously not exactly how anything works, I do think it at least approximately characterizes the functioning of America’s suburban jurisdictions.
But big cities are different.
The lucky ones, like New York, are heirs to industry clusters that create value. Others, like Miami, benefit from good weather and proximity to beaches. Los Angeles has both. Essentially all cities attract commuters and people who visit for the nightlife and entertainment amenities without actually living there. To an extent, all those transients increase costs (they use the transportation infrastructure, the fire department needs to deal with them, etc). But on net, they are clear contributors: they don’t send their kids to school, for starters, and police and fire needs mostly scale with land area rather than population.
Now, of course, there are also unlucky cities like Detroit or Cleveland, which have seen their one-time industrial base evaporate and are now locked in a cycle of population decline. The problems facing these cities are very serious and you can find extensive discussion of that in One Billion Americans. Suffice it to say this discussion is not about places like that.
The lucky cities, if you didn’t know anything about politics or the real world, might be expected to follow a “business model” in which they have lower tax rates than suburban jurisdictions since they can milk the surplus generated by the central business district to maintain equally good services. Of course, that’s not really what happens. Instead, big cities attract a lot of residents with left-wing political commitments who tolerate higher levels of taxation. That surplus is then spent on more generous welfare programs and public sector jobs.
The fiscal picture in New York
Up until the pandemic, the basic business model of New York was working really well.
Demand for living in the city was both high and rising, as witnessed by high and rising housing costs. New York’s population was shrinking before the pandemic, which sounds bad. But note, again, that this was not due to falling demand (which would show up in falling prices). Instead, rising demand for NYC living was bidding up prices to the point where the number of people living there was falling. From a business model standpoint, this is good. Instead of a working-class family of four occupying a two-bedroom apartment, you might have a Dual Income No Kids professional couple that both pays more in taxes (dines out more, etc.) and consumes less in public services (no school).
Now it turns out that to actually compare different American cities’ tax situations is very challenging because American cities differ considerably in their basic functions — Los Angeles and Chicago are inside their respective counties, while Philadelphia and Jacksonville are counties, New York encompasses five counties, and Columbus encompasses parts of three different counties.
The good news is that the Lincoln Land Institute has done the hard work of creating Fiscally Standardized Cities — i.e., you look at all the local government functions that happen inside the boundaries of the city — so that you can make meaningful comparisons. Then, you can look at tax revenue across the fifteen largest Fiscally Standardized Cities (recall these are municipalities, not metro areas) and see that New York has a lot of tax revenue.
[graph]
That was the situation as of 2017, at any rate. I should be clear: about $650 of that revenue is due to New York State’s unique system of forcing local governments to contribute to the state’s Medicaid program. Still, even accounting for Medicaid, New York takes in more money per resident than any of the other biggest cities.
Today, New York is facing a huge budget hole caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. If that turns out to be because of one-off losses of tax revenue due to reduced commuting, food sales, and entertainment during 2020, then the city will clearly find a way to cope. But the risk for New York is that a year-long experiment in remote working seems likely to create a structural reduction in demand for Manhattan office space. Not that the city’s main business precincts are about to become ghost towns out of I Am Legend, it’s just that they are going to become cheaper. Some companies will decide they don’t need the expense, and landlords will need to cut prices to tempt in some new tenants who were previously priced out. This could also create a structural decline in the demand for New York housing when people who previously needed to live in NYC don’t need to anymore, now that their job is permanently partially (or fully) remote.
On a lot of levels, I think a cheaper New York will be welcome. In 2003, Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit proclaimed his city “poor but sexy” (i.e., affordable to artists and cool people) and there’s really something to that. Coolness often emerges in urban areas as a result of a negative economic shock. When people say they want to “keep Austin weird,” they are recalling a specific moment in the city’s life associated with a Texas real estate bust. And an exodus of businesses from Montreal due to Québec’s language policies set the stage for an indie rock boom.
But in basic fiscal terms, it’s a problem.
New York has been parceling out the surplus to local government workers during the pre-pandemic boom, and that’s not sustainable if the city stops booming. Here’s an eye-opening chart from Eric Kober at the Manhattan Institute:
[graph]
And that’s just wages. Teacher benefits in New York are 69 percent more costly per pupil than in Boston, the second-costliest big city, and more than double any other large school district (the way the city’s own budget data works, they record “pensions and fringe benefits” as 18 percent of city spending). That kind of thing is only sustainable if property tax revenue keeps growing faster than inflation, which it no longer is.
Pay the surplus out to people
Conservatives will look at these facts, shake their heads at the profligacy of America’s big cities, and curse the evils of public sector unions (except police unions, where left and right will switch their opinions). But by the same token, conservatives don’t live or vote in big cities like New York, so it doesn’t matter what they think. As long as the city’s economy is doing well, it’s fairly easy for unions to beat landlords and billionaires in a pitched fight for the use of the city’s fiscal resources.
And during the Bill de Blasio era, the idea that the city needed to worry about its competitiveness would’ve seemed particularly risible to the electorate.
If New York finds itself in an acute fiscal crisis, the voters may have no choice but to do what conservatives want, but it seems like a shame for a city to ricochet between profligacy and austerity without a middle ground as a city that’s generous without being wasteful.
A more durable commitment might be to say that the city wants to get spending under control, and then if revenues grow in the future, the default will be to pay the money out as UBI checks to its citizens. That doesn’t mean you can never raise spending. But it does mean that the question of higher spending — whether that’s higher salaries or a subway expansion or anything else — becomes the question of “would you rather have this thing or would you rather have more money?” That application of a cash alternative is a natural source of political discipline.
Some math:
- The Census says New York has about 8.3 million residents
- Yang’s presidential campaign proposed $1,000 per month for every adult citizen
- About 4.9 million New Yorkers are adult US citizens
- Paying them all $1,000 per month would cost about $58 billion per year
- In the 2017 Lincoln numbers, New York collected about $71 billion in taxes (there’s also a bunch of state and federal grant money in the mix for all cities).
[graph]
That said, if New York managed to cut its revenue needs down to median Fiscally Standardized City, it would free up $45 billion per year in extra money! That’s not enough for Yang’s $12,000 a year UBI, but it would be enough to give every adult US citizen in New York $9,242 per year.
Grow the surplus
Of course, this is all a bit fanciful. But as a way of thinking about urban policy, I think it could be constructive. For example, while it’s basically impossible to get directly comparable data on mass transit spending, obviously New York City is maintaining a giant transit system that other places don’t have. If you combine state and local money, New York State spends $1,121 per person per year on transit, which is way more than Massachusetts, the third-highest state, with its $505 per person per year. But in this case, you really are getting a more robust transit network.
But as I detailed in “Fixing The Mass Transit Crisis,” it’s not like all this money is going to super useful services — they use two-person crews to operate subway trains and multiple conductors on commuter rail. Basically nowhere in the world does the former, and none of the high-performing regional rail systems in Europe or Asia do the latter. The MTA is also paying 30 percent more than Boston’s MBTA per passenger mile of bus service. For that matter, there’s also the question of fares. Right now, fares are a source of revenue, but they’re not set at a revenue-maximizing level. That’s in part because extra revenue gets captured by the workforce and in part because it’s seen as a social service benefit to low-income people. If you’re living in the UBI city, you try to maximize the efficiency of your labor arrangements and maximize the farebox revenue, and then the surplus kicks out to the public and that’s what protects low-income people.
My obsession, obviously, is with housing.
New York could easily generate more market-rate construction by rezoning. Even with prices falling due to the pandemic shock to demand, New York remains more expensive than the average American city, and the price of housing is above replacement costs. Right now, market-rate construction doesn’t make a big fiscal contribution to the city because builders get the 421-a tax exemption. But that, in turn, is tied up with parking requirements, the city’s effort to get in-kind payments in the form of affordable housing, rules discouraging the use of cranes (this creates extra jobs but raises costs), and other regulations. It’s such an ouroboros of rent-seeking that it’s not really in the interests of a typical New York voter to try to unlock the potential economic surplus here. If you untangle one bit, it’ll just flow to someone else.
But in the UBI City, you scrap the tax exemption and take a hard look at regulatory barriers to building. More buildings —> more property tax revenue (and when the residents move in, more sales and income tax revenue, too) —> more UBI money for you.
UBI City everywhere?
I don’t think this necessarily works as a general formula for urban governance. The whole point here is that New York is collecting an unusually large amount of tax revenue. But it is worth saying that San Francisco — the New York of the West — collects even more revenue per capita, seems to me to have worse public services, is also facing a potentially large post-pandemic shock to its tax base, and is better supplied than NYC with tech industry UBI enthusiasts.
But if a big UBI-centric push for economic government did take off in those two cultural flagship cities, that could help encourage the Seattles and Bostons and DCs of the world to take a harder look at their own business model.
Most American cities, unfortunately, are not lucky enough to have the problems of New York or San Francisco.
Sunbelt cities are actively competing with each other to try and grow, and we have lots of Rust Belt cities fighting, often unsuccessfully, to stave off decline. New York looms so large in our media consciousness that NYC problems sometimes get mistaken for “city problems” in a way that doesn’t make sense. Philadelphia is going to be suffering some kind of negative hit to demand for Center City office space, and it’s going to need to navigate that without the fiscal buffers that New York and San Francisco enjoy.
So don’t take any of this too seriously. But I do think that everyone knows urban governance is broken in the United States, and the same-old-same-old isn’t going to fix it. I’m not a particular UBI enthusiast in general, but it’s an interesting framework for thinking about these problems and possibly creating a new path forward.
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
Just thought this was well worth quoting. Those most opposed to the current divide might agree.
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
He seems like someone who would resonate with younger voters, many of whom just recently registered to vote.
"Young for Yang"
"Young for Yang"
sho nuff
Footballguy
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
I want to be Mayor of New York but my god can you imagine actually living here?
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
Next NYC Mayor Odds per bovada.com:
Andrew Yang-175
Eric Adams+300
Maya Wiley+950
Scott Stringer+1000
Raymond McGuire+1600
Kathryn Garcia+5000
Shaun Donovan+5000
Carlos Menchaca+6600
Dianne Morales+6600
Andrew Yang-175
Eric Adams+300
Maya Wiley+950
Scott Stringer+1000
Raymond McGuire+1600
Kathryn Garcia+5000
Shaun Donovan+5000
Carlos Menchaca+6600
Dianne Morales+6600
Redwes25
Footballguy
I can't imagine living in Florida. I have never wanted to leave a place faster.
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
GordonGekko
Footballguy
For AOC, it's a great thing.
A lot of things are falling to place for her, most of it is failures from both the Republicans and Democrats around her, to have a clean shot at POTUS in 2028.
The border crisis puts the Latino vote at risk for the DNC. We are talking long term damage that might last generations. In order to hold some key Big Blue strongholds, Harris might be forced to offer AOC half the ticket in 2024. Newsom's new sexual scandal might have cooked him permanently. If he had thinly survived recall and didn't have the new affair scandal, there was a decent chance he could have gotten the new VP nod. Being forced to give AOC half the ticket essentially sends a message to Pete Buttigieg that he's only useful as a prop for the Obama/Biden/Harris regime. AOC can offer him half the ticket in 2028. Now she has the gay vote. If AOC can offer Klobuchar something juicy, she will have backdoor access to some of the most powerful Congressional committees.
If she's able to consolidate New York further, not just Yang, she will have sway with big money donors ( via the financial district), some legacy DNC delegates, a cross over section from Hollywood (NY film/arts/theater/music) and a large scale test city for Green New Deal concepts. In 2028, she's still right at that edge to have a child.
Eight years from now, pregnant, pushing M4A to replace Obamacare and Biden/Harris imploding/taking the hit over the border, economy and identity politics, she can take a better than clean shot. Especially if Harris loses to Haley to create an alternating platform four years later. It doesn't matter if AOC is part of a 2024 POTUS campaign that loses, it will enable large scale money support from legacy leftist benefactors that can no longer deny her rising star status.
AOC might be the luckiest person in professional politics. The infighting and partisan **** measuring contests around her are giving her natural pathways towards widespread contender legitimacy.
I actually like Yang quite a bit. He sounds like a real person talking about real problems and he seems to have some actual grasp of functional logistics. I'd rather he be the POTUS contender over AOC, but like many American Idol contestants, he'll fall to the wayside because he just doesn't have a good enough story to sell the national audience to overcome the silent racism at work against him. I usually don't drive the racism angle, but for Asian men in politics, it's just an entirely unique ballgame compared to everyone else.
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
-jb-
Footballguy
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
I would vote for him just to piss those people off. (Yang also seems like a pretty good guy).NorvilleBarnes said:
I have a comment about this, but I am saving it for the official Andrew Yang for NY Mayor thread.NorvilleBarnes said:
HellToupee
Footballguy
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
Last edited by a moderator:
The General
Footballguy
He's going to win
Don't follow NYC politics too closely but De Balsio from afar is very unlikable, pretty sure he's disliked in NYC as well. Yang is an affable dude, great talker.
Don't follow NYC politics too closely but De Balsio from afar is very unlikable, pretty sure he's disliked in NYC as well. Yang is an affable dude, great talker.
Redwes25
Footballguy
It really is an interesting dynamic in NYC. He and Eric Adams (running second in that poll) are on the moderate end of the spectrum and the really progressive folks running haven’t gotten much traction. That Stringer hasn’t gotten much support is the most surprising given he is currently the comptroller and really progressive (working families party just endorsed him which has weight here in NYC on the left).
I honestly think it is exhaustion with Diblasio who is not liked and was viewed as the very progressive candidate when he won.
I personally haven’t decided who to vote for but leaning Adams at this point but will likely pick the moderate who is most likely to win. Will be my first vote in a Dem primary as I recently changed parties from Republican since the travesty of Trump and also the need to have my vote count in local elections given everything is decided in the primary here.
I honestly think it is exhaustion with Diblasio who is not liked and was viewed as the very progressive candidate when he won.
I personally haven’t decided who to vote for but leaning Adams at this point but will likely pick the moderate who is most likely to win. Will be my first vote in a Dem primary as I recently changed parties from Republican since the travesty of Trump and also the need to have my vote count in local elections given everything is decided in the primary here.
-jb-
Footballguy
Redwes25
Footballguy
I like his qualifications as a former cop that moved up to the rank of Captain and think he has done a good job as borough President in my home borough (though that job is a bit ceremonial). I would hope the combo of police experience and being African American could help with Police issues in a positive way. I think we could also really use an African American mayor as last one the city had was not a good one.
He is also pretty moderate (used to be a Republican for a time in the 90s) and I hope realistic as we move out of Covid vs pie in sky stuff that comes from Diblasio and other progressives. That gets to my biggest issue in mayor race which is I really don’t want the most liberal/progressive this city can come up with, which was Diblasio last go around. That really leaves me with a choice of him and Wang. Wang just doesn’t seem realistic and I worry about having a quasi celebrity with no real experience as mayor. It is clear to me that celebrities don’t make good political leaders.
Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
-I like this guy simply because he gets stimulating conversation going. I might disagree with his Liberal tendencies but again so many folks have forgotten fundamentals when it comes to politics and this guy gets people talking on both sides, how is that a negative? I like this guy, sorry to my Conservative buddies but this is a guy I could feel good about on election day and I'm OK with those who disagree(Think NYC b4 ye yell at MoP) and i also am open to learning more...meaning maybe I don't know enough dirt about the guy but quite frankly his surface appearance works just fine.
Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
I just have to say, when my thinking is in line with BOTH of you, I usually know I'm on the right side of things.
quick-hands
Footballguy
Scarborough and Duetsch dont like him. Thats a good sign
-jb-
Footballguy
That interview where Scarborough claims he and Dueueiuetsch could do a better job running NYC is laughable.
quick-hands
Footballguy
And they are worried about an extremist running the city. Those two are the voice of moderation and reason. I wonder if anyone has ever seen scarborough and timsochet in same room?
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NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
E Street Brat
Footballguy
E Street Brat
Footballguy
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
El Floppo
Footballguy
Don't forget we're ranking them this year, so 2nd place in your rankings has weight.
Wait...is this the politics forums? : Stepping back quickly :
AAABatteries
Footballguy
It’s very interesting his appeal across party lines. He’s a really smart dude and I don’t think anybody has accused either side of having too many of those.
I’m here for the Yang Bang.
I’m here for the Yang Bang.
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
sho nuff
Footballguy
Id say the appeal to some will be short lived. Just a guess given how we have seen what happens even to those in the Republican Party who cross Trump. I think some of Yang's appeal to the right, at the moment, is that some of his ideas are not popular with the establishment Democrats. If so, they should be careful because he seems to be growing in popularity and giving some a different alternative to Bernie. And they don't seem to be able to tear Yang down as well when it comes to painting him as a socialist communist and whatever else they have thrown at Bernie.
PennStater77
Footballguy
Hopefully Curtis Sliwa runs a good campaign, NYC is there for the Red team this election, especially after how horrible the previous Mayor was.
Navin Johnson
Footballguy
He alienated the left and it will take a long time to get that support back - if he ever does. He was polling at 32% in early May. That number cut pretty much in half over night. He could have written his own ticket but felt the need to pander.
Max Power
Footballguy
What did he do to alienate the left?
The guy probably needs to just be an Independent at this point.
Navin Johnson
Footballguy
The progressive left to be more accurate. He had an ill timed tweet saying that he stands with Israel on May 10. He received immediate blow back on social media, then went on a few progressive news outlets where they gave him ample opportunity to balance his statement, which he passed on. It was clear someone was off camera coaching his answers (zoom interview). His drop from over 30% support to mid-high teens happened immediately after.
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