First off, Mr. Andrew Yang's plan...
Every US adult (18 and older) would receive $1k/month regardless of employment status. Those on welfare (non-Medicaid) could get either their welfare benefits or the $1k but not both.
The Factors in the Math...
There are ~327M people in the US. According to the 2010 census approximately 23% are under 18, meaning 77% would be eligible to receive the UBI.
FY2018 saw spending of ~$450B on non-Medicaid welfare.
327M - 23% = 251,790,000 adults. Multiply that by $1,000 and you get $251,790,000,000 per month. So each month we would be spending on this program over half of what it took to fund the program it's designed to replace for a full year!
$251,790,000,000 x 12 months = $3,021,480,000,000
$3T vs $450B...
But wait! What about the VAT?
A Value-Added Tax is far closer to a sales tax than an income tax. As such it would likely require a Constitutional Amendment before it could be implemented. Such a tax would be a major penalty to businesses as it's assessed at each stage of the production chain. Such increases would be passed on to the consumer. What this means is that the necessary spike in prices a VAT would cause would defeat the revenue it was intended to provide.
Now a dose of reality...
Section 8, TANF, CHIP, SNAP, etc aren't going anywhere. Medicaid/care is especially not going anywhere. Even the revisions that created TANF didn't pass without a fight (even now that we have two decades of data showing a decline in use since then).
What we would end up with would be a UBI as in addition to the welfare programs (the rhetoric would be "UBI is a 'right'"). That would either break the country within a decade or force the VAT amendment into passage.
If the VAT were to pass it would become yet another tool Congress would use to buy their re-elections because it would not be long before it was claimed that $1k/month is not a "living wage" (and thus it would quickly grow beyond 10%). If $1000 UBI is a good idea, what's wrong with 1005, or 1100, or 1125? What is magical about the number 1000? More funny part about the VAT. If Andrew Yang is tying the UBI to inflation (and he'll need to or else it becomes another minimum wage battle every few years) then trying to pay for it with a VAT is a self-perpetuating cost increase. Let's say UBI comes into existence, that's $1k per month of buying power. You install the 10% VAT, you've just increased prices across the board by 10% and so that $1k will pretty quickly need to be $1,100 just to keep up. Bumping it up to $1,100 would mean you need to increase the VAT to pay for it which would then increase prices more...
Conclusion: Andrew Yang's ideas aren't just moronic, they are dangerously bad.
