Andrew Yang on economy: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
“the roosevelt institute studied this plan of everyone getting a thousand bucks a month and projected it would create two million new jobs and grow the economy by eight to ten percent”
What the evidence says
The Roosevelt Institute did publish a real macroeconomic analysis of a UBI proposal, but Yang's framing omits how that growth estimate was generated. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model's review of the Roosevelt study, Roosevelt modeled a $500/month ($6,000/year) payment to every adult and projected GDP could rise by as much as 6.8% within eight years, only in the scenario where the program was financed entirely by new government borrowing (deficit financing) rather than by a tax. Roosevelt's model also showed an increase in jobs in that same deficit-financed scenario, but Penn Wharton's brief does not report Roosevelt's estimate as a specific '2 million jobs' or 'eight to ten percent' figure, so those exact numbers cannot be verified against this source. Penn Wharton's own independent dynamic model disputes Roosevelt's approach on methodological grounds, arguing it omits how added federal debt crowds out capital investment and does not account for reduced household labor supply, and it projects that a comparably sized UBI would shrink GDP under every financing method it tested, including a payroll-tax-financed version. Because Yang presented the growth and jobs numbers on-air as straightforward projections of his plan without noting they came from a debt-financed scenario, not the VAT-funded plan he actually proposed, and because a credible independent model reaches the opposite conclusion, the claim as stated is misleading by omission even though it draws on a real study.