I partially agree.

The VAT is fine as one of several funding methods. He also used multiple others, including carbon tax, raising capital gains tax rates, ending payroll tax cap for social security, and financial transactions tax. VAT gets everyone’s skin in the game some, and raises quite a lot. What I do agree with is that he could have included more progressive taxation sources like eliminating tax deductions or raising marginal income tax rates, among other things.

Also, his policy did replace the most conditional welfares and remove benefit cliffs and work disincentives. Ironically, he got a lot of misguided pushback from liberals and progressives for that.

He shouldn’t have cut all of SSI, though. He should have left at least some of it in place and made it unconditional on anything but the state of being disabled (i.e. not means or work-tested).

He also should have included a smaller child benefit, for various reasons.

Anyway, I could go on about the imperfections in his policy (I made the calculator that analyzes policies, after all), but those are not why he lost. He got the conversation quite far from where he started, more so than many imagined was possible. He was coming from total obscurity and he made the idea mainstream. It speaks to both his character and charisma, and even more so to the raw power of the idea of UBI.

Yang’s campaign was a very large step, even a leap, for the movement. And while his Freedom Dividend left room for improvement, even as is it would have been transformational and beneficial to a level very few people understand.