Andrew Yang on economy: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
“a value-added tax at even half the European level generates about 800 billion in new revenue. And that gets you all the way there.”
What the evidence says
Yang's 2020 campaign proposed a 10% VAT (roughly half the average European VAT rate) to help fund a $1,000-per-month universal basic income, with Yang claiming this tax alone would raise about $800 billion a year. Independent modeling shows this figure is highly sensitive to methodology: Yale's Budget Lab notes that a VAT's revenue yield depends heavily on which categories of consumption (health care, education, imputed financial services, housing) are excluded from the taxable base, so narrower, more realistic bases can produce substantially different revenue than a full-consumption VAT estimate. Separately, economist analysis cited by PolitiFact found that even after netting out Yang's proposed VAT and welfare-program offsets, the Freedom Dividend's net fiscal cost remained about 3.3% of GDP, indicating the VAT and offsets combined did not fully cover the program's cost as claimed. Taken together, independent analysts generally viewed Yang's VAT-funding math for a full $12,000-per-year universal basic income as not adding up, making the claim that the VAT "gets you all the way there" unsupported.