Interested in Andrew Yang? The first mayor has recently adopted the habit of making reasonable, if not powerful, suggestions to govern Gotham, and is driving his rivals crazy. Yang has not shown that he is ready to be mayor, but the baffling responses of his competitors to even the most obvious ideas show that they are not.
Yang’s least interesting or constructive idea is his signature number: universal basic income. Last year he ran for the presidency to give every adult in the United States $ 1,000 a month. The idea is to give the poor a choice about what to do with their money, instead of giving them housing vouchers, food, and so on. UBI gives everyone a weapon against wage stagnation and job automation and relocation.
The Big Apple can’t give every adult $ 1,000 a month. It would cost $ 80 billion a year, surpassing tax revenue. So Yang offers a naked version of his “universal” plan: $ 167 a month for the poorest half a million New Yorkers. But he never explains key details.
However, he ignores UBI and Yang has other useful ideas. Last week he suggested the city not raise taxes on the best winners, as it could drive them away. “If you raise taxes. . . where people actually vote with their feet and head to Florida, then they don’t meet the goal of politics, ”he told the Association for a Better New York.
Yang also suggested that the city consider incentives to attract suburban workers who have been off their Manhattan desk for a year to give the trip another chance. This is also worth a try: why not give people vouchers to catch the commuter rail, with expiration dates in a couple of months, to bore them at home trying a trip to the city? (The city’s rival and controller, Scott Stringer, predictably accused him of practicing “municipal Reaganomics”).
Yang also suggested to Mayor Bill de Blasio not to spend the full $ 6 billion in aid we get from the feds. Since the city could face years of deficits, Yang said, it would be prudent to make a 70% squirrel.
This is sensible, but another rival, Blasio’s former lawyer, Maya Wiley, attacked him. “Our city deserves a serious leader, not a mini-Trump,” his spokeswoman said. Eh?
Eric Adams, president of the Brooklyn district, needed no reason to deal with Yang. At an event that accepted the support of a union, where he should have been in a good mood, Adams said “people like Andrew Yang” have never “occupied any [their] all the life. . . . you will not come to this city and think that you will ignore the people. ”
Yang is a lawyer. He has worked in startups, run a school testing company and founded and run a non-profit organization training people to be entrepreneurs in troubled cities. He has always had a job. And he has been living in New York for a quarter of a century.
What is behind the attacks is that the privileged are afraid of the foreigner.
The bet of the privileged is that Yang’s leadership status will disappear when voters pay attention. Yang holds about 16 percent of the vote, followed closely by Adams. Half of the voters remain undecided.
But the idea that people suddenly learn who Stringer and Adams are and get excited about them is pretty tenuous. And, as the latest Fontas Advisors poll shows, people, 85%, know who Yang is.
But they also know who Stringer and Adams are, with 64 and 62 percent. Wiley, with 42%, has room to run. The others do not.
Stringer and Adams also face a threat from other candidates with little name recognition. Ray McGuire was a professional investment banker; Kathryn Garcia headed the sanitation department. Only a third of voters know who they are. As voters learn, they may like what they see and engage in the undecided.
The final joke: voting in a qualified election. Of course, Adams and Stringer could fight each other for a few votes, just to see how everyone split the first choice between them and then choose Yang, the kind Yankees Games assistant, as the second option, putting him at the helm. .
Yang’s critics aren’t entirely wrong: he demonstrates a baffling lack of familiarity with the city government, and some of his ideas, like building a casino on Governors Island, are simply weird and silly. But for voters who want a change in a crisis, their well-known main rivals are too familiar with the government.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor for City Journal.
Twitter: @NicoleGelinas