Holy shit. They did it. The crazy bastards did it. @MSNBC created a graphic with photos of the 20 candidates to appear in the first debates, and they actually went so far as to remove @AndrewYang and include someone who didn't even qualify. This is shameless in how brazen it is.
Good Lord. @MSNBC just can't help themselves. In the latest example, they include his photo in a list of top 8, and manage to read every name but @AndrewYang's??
Isn't it kind of odd how @MSNBC went with 7 bars here instead of 8? Doesn't it look asymmetrically unappealing? Does it look to you like something is missing? That number 8 spot belongs to @AndrewYang with 1.1%.
I'm going to go ahead and leave this here in this thread, as it obviously belongs here. You can force the brass at NBC to put someone on the stage according to their rules, but you can't force them to ask him anything beyond the absolute minimum of questions. #DemDebate#YangGang
With #LetYangSpeak now trending across the country, I feel I should expand this thread with some more examples of blatant MSNBC shenanigans in their treatment of Andrew Yang. Here's where they spoke over his appearance at the Poor People's Campaign Forum.
This egregious behavior has even been noted by @FAIRmediawatch where despite polling 8th at the time, an MSNBC graphic earlier this month excluded Andrew Yang in a photo compilation of 20 candidates. #LetYangSpeak#YangGang
10/ In this latest NBC graphic, @AndrewYang's positive Twitter mention percentage is literally off the charts, likely because #LetYangSpeak was a top trending keyword nationwide all day on Friday and anything over 40% couldn't be displayed… Also, no room for a 9th anyway, right?
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What if everyone spent every waking hour making really cool things? How cool would that be? Well consider also that there would be no hours spent enjoying anything created because everyone would be creating not enjoying.
Are the things actually cool if no one gets to enjoy them?
6-day weeks used to be normal. Then 5-day weeks became normal. It's past time for 4-day weeks to become normal. There's just so much stuff being created, and increasingly by machines. Humans need more time to actually enjoy all the stuff and life itself. We need to shift gears.
But what about all the jobs going unfilled? Paying people more per hour for fewer total hours per week would make many jobs more attractive, and the people filling those jobs would be less exhausted and more productive. Plus they'd have more time as consumers to create more jobs.
Interesting threat. Basically, Mitch is like "Look here, everyone. If you make it easier to debate and vote on legislation, we're going to start debating and voting on legislation, and none of us here want that, right?"
Mitch is framing it like a bad thing, for Congress to actually debate and vote on bills, because some votes could make legislators look bad to their constituents, but the lack of that is exactly the problem. If a lawmaker votes yes on unpopular laws, then voters SHOULD fire them.
Right now, elections have less teeth, which is helping drive polarization. People just vote for their favorite team, and because of gridlock, people win based on what they say. If they start actually doing unpopular things, that could change who people actually vote for.
I chatted with @JENFL23 the other day about UBI, MMT, ranked-choice voting, the @Fwd_Party, and about incentives in general and how what @AndrewYang is trying to do is to get people excited about reforming systems with reforms that don't typically excite.
Getting people excited about the possibility of starting to receive $1,000 a month is a lot easier than getting people excited about the prospect of being able to vote for more than one candidate, and ranking them to convey preferences. But the former may just require the latter.
To those not steeped in politics, especially those turned off by it, it's really challenging to get people excited about reforming a process they aren't interested in, but we need to try, and that's what Yang is attempting to do. He's trying to mobilize the disengaged.
We must break out of our current understanding of taxing to spend that limits our ability to spend, when the only real limits we have are our real capacity limits. The issue isn't lack of money. It's what to do in addition to spending to manage inflation.
We are watching what happens in real-time of this belief that we can't somehow afford $3.5 trillion in spending, despite being our own currency issuer. Means-tested stuff gets more means-tested. Stuff gets axed. Other stuff expires faster. It's the wrong discussion to be having.
We shouldn't be arguing over what to save and what to cut and what to trim. The debate should be on how to best design the programs, and then how to best manage the impacts of that spending on the economy. What kind and amount of taxes? How to best improve supply chain issues?
67% of over 1,000 Americans surveyed in new poll support #UBI. Support was strongest among Democrats (82%), Gen Z (79%), Finance and Insurance (71%), non-college grads (71%), and those earning under $25,000 (77%).
The top benefit of UBI according to those surveyed was that it would decrease both poverty and inequality, and help those with poor health and disabilities.
The top concerns were that it would reduce the incentive to work and increase the national debt by costing too much.
When asked how people would use their UBI, most people said they'd save it for retirement, or save it for emergencies, or buy groceries, or pay off debt.
GenZ with the strongest support for UBI is the most likely to pay off student loan debt with it.
We just ran a huge unemployment experiment. Half the states reduced UI, it didn't increase employment compared to the states that kept UI. Then the UI expired and it didn't increase employment. Obviously UI isn't the issue but they REALLY want to force people to accept low wages.
These people want so badly to exploit others for their own benefit, that they don't seem to see that they're making things worse for themselves too. You can't cut incomes in a consumer economy and expect employment to rocket up. Consumer spending is what fuels our economy.
If we want to increase employment, we need to realize a pandemic still exists, and that's the main issue to tackle. We also need to make sure everyone has money to spend, and that they can afford things like child care to make employment make sense.