Andrew Yang on economy: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
“we're spending about $1.5 trillion right now on 126 welfare programs”
What the evidence says
Yang's figure descends from a lineage of "means-tested welfare spending" tallies (commonly sourced to the Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, and Senate Budget Committee staff) that add up federal and state spending across dozens to well over 100 programs restricted to lower-income recipients. Fact-checks of similar claims by other politicians (Rep. Jim Jordan's "77 programs" and Rep. Paul Ryan's "over $1 trillion") found the underlying counts accurate as arithmetic but noted the total mixes very different kinds of spending: it includes Medicaid (much of it going to nursing-home care for the elderly, not cash aid to the poor), education and community-development grants paid to institutions rather than individuals, and other in-kind or intermediated spending. Analysts across the political spectrum, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to the Cato Institute, have agreed that such totals cannot simply be divided among poor Americans or redirected dollar-for-dollar into a universal basic income, since large shares are health-care payments, institutional funding, or benefits to a population well beyond the poverty-line population Yang's UBI proposal targets. The $1.5 trillion figure and 126-program count are broadly consistent with the scale of such tallies as of the time of the podcast, but citing the aggregate without noting that most of it is Medicaid and other non-cash, non-redirectable spending overstates how much money is realistically available to fund a $1,000-a-month UBI through consolidation alone.