I like Corey Johnson because he stood up to Airbnb, but Yang is not a gimmick. I just don’t know where that idea comes from.
Everything about Yang 2020 was a gimmick. He was dubiously qualified, his plans ranged from the economically illiterate to the unconstitutional, and his support base was...memey...to say the least. And now you guys want this weirdo running a city of 8 million people. No thanks.
I didn’t agree we everything he proposed but his way of thinking in many ways has been entirely vindicated by the pandemic. You’re making him out as this memey weirdo like Kanye or Vermin Supreme. He’s an accomplished businesses man who has written extensively on socioeconomics. Sure some of his supporters are idiots but if we judged every candidate just on their worst supporter we’d get nowhere. Yang proved to be a far more seriously competitive candidate than many comparatively “serious” politicians. And I never even supported him for president.
So yes I want him to run my city of 8 million people.
Still not a particularly good endorsement. Being a second-rate businessman with a loose grasp of socioeconomics is not a strong rationale for electing someone mayor. My bet is that he'd try a few gimmicky reforms but fail miserably against NYC's enormous institutional intertia (the unions, NYPD, Wall Street, PANYNJ, the MTA) because at the end of the day, he has no idea how to run a city. I'm very unimpressed by the tech bro move-fast-and-break-things approach to municipal governance.
Loose grasp? Half his platform has been vindicated by the crisis. And I trust him to deal with the cogs of governance far more than any of the various ingrained city politicians who indebted to a collage of those groups. Yang has made no enemies or debts and I trust his ability to manage successfully.
Has it though? A couple stimulus checks is hardly an endorsement of Yang's platform. Anyone who thinks a UBI would reduce rather than exacerbate wealth inequality most certainly has a loose grasp on economics. Yang may not have any enemies, but he also has no friends. And nobody is going to break these institutions power alone. Yang's experience is essentially helping out a couple hundred entrepreneurs. Running a city as complicated as New York is several orders of magnitude more complicated and you can't learn on the job. NYC would be much better served by a reformist local politician who actually understands how the system works and has the experience to improve it. Yang isn't that person.
It's not the stimulus checks, it's the crisis itself which has accelerated the need for many of his policies. In New York City especially so. I would prefer a fresh face with a list of policies that make all the sense right now and an innovative approach to policy making to the alternatives.
Which ones make sense?
UBI?
The legion of builders and destroyers?
Modern time banking?
Data as intellectual property?
A Department of the Attention Economy?
Cutting funding to higher ed?
They're all absurd, and they do nothing to fix New York's three big problems: the MTA, housing affordability, and crooked law enforcement. C'mon, he doesn't have a clue how to make actual change and build coalitions in the areas that actually matter.
I don't think anyone calling himself Blairite can lecture anyone else about economical absurdity.
