My Parents Give Me $28k a Year • Hacker News Board

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#41

Post by Alex3917 » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

intopieces wrote: post #11

My guess is this is of interest to us because it sounds an awful lot like UBI. But, I think the key difference is that the money is connected to parents, who presumably have a standard for how it's spent. If E.J. ended up spending it on drugs or other perceived vices, there's a chance the money might be cut off. The point of UBI is that it is 100% no-strings-attached, which has a different dynamic. That dynamic is on…

> If E.J. ended up spending it on drugs or other perceived vices, there's a chance the money might be cut off.

But there's no reason why if someone was being self-destructive, a judge couldn't just freeze their ability to spend some portion of their money until they had their life straightened out.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#42

Post by ydnaclementine » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:53 PM UTC

Boy, does reading this make me a bit frustrated/jealous. Some people are just incredibly lucky (at no fault of their own!). I would write more, but it would be more therapeutic for me than entertaining to read for you. I also found the author referencing gender/race distracting(?), this situation could happen to anyone.

If you do find this type of stuff about what the wealthy do with their wealth interesting, I highly recommend a book called `Millionaire Next Door`

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#43

Post by eatbitseveryday » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

> Still, when my parents told me they were going to give me about $2,000 a month, [...] I took it, spent part of it helping my then-boyfriend pay off his student loans and put the rest in the bank.

> When my boyfriend suddenly left me (as men in New York are occasionally known to do), I had to pay $1,450 a month for rent on my own ($17,400 a year) on the lease we had just started, not including utilities. I quickly drained my own savings and found myself completely dependent on the gift money from my parents.

Why spend your money on another when they can just leave you later? They won't give you that money back. What did he do to earn your money (parents') to pay his student loans off?

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#44

Post by charlesdm » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #34

ntumlin wrote: post #21

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but could someone explain the rationale for taxing gifts within a family? Ignoring the possibility of using it to circumvent an income tax, etc., my initial thought is that if my dad wants to give me $30,001 this year, or even $300,000 this year, that he's already paid taxes on it and it's not the government's business. I feel the same way about inheritance taxes, although tho…

The gift tax exists largely to prevent people from avoiding estate tax by gifting large sums of money just before death. That's why they're linked. If there was an estate tax and no gift tax, people would just give all their money away in the years leading up to death. The gift tax exemption is co-mingled with the estate tax exemption, so you can just think of the gift tax as pre-death estate taxes. As for why we hav…

Very much depends on the policy country. In Belgium you can gift any arbitrary amount ($10,000, $5m, $100m) through a notarial deed (up to a day) before death and pay 3% "gift tax".

But the estate tax gets to 27% in the low hundreds of thousands.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#45

Post by crooked-v » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

mobileexpert wrote: post #27

A refrain that is very true in NYC. It is a bit off-putting (and just wrong) to read the author talk about white male privilege being a comparable head start to her half a million dollars of family money she’s received. (And 28,000/yr still coming!) For an essay centered on owning up to personal privilege it still has some serious short comings in recognizing how extreme her wealth privilege is versus almost all intr…

Consider that even well-known black movie stars occasionally get the "shopping while black" treatment. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/forest-whitaker-fa... Having even absurd amounts of money doesn't make bias just go away.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#46

Post by clint » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #29

coliveira wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People treat drug users as if this was something that they chose to do. In fact, most drug addicts are in this situation because they suffer from a tendency to drug abuse. Many of them had good jobs and lost them because of this condition. Holding up on the UBI program for everyone else because of the behavior of a few that need treatment is absurd.

Nobody is compelled to take methamphetamines or heroin, especially not the first time. Yes, physical addiction is a beastly problem beyond simply quitting cold turkey - but you sort of put yourself in that boat to begin with. It's a bit like not knowing how to swim, and deciding to jump into the ocean. If you don't know how to swim, don't jump in the ocean.

Since we're using bad analogies I would argue its more like being offered a piece of delicious candy and its great and you continue to eat the candy and its fine.

Eventually you wake up one day and decide you've been gaining too much weight and you try to stop eating the candy but to your surprise, over the past several months or years your brain chemistry has been subtly changed and now your physical well-being and mental state is literally tied to you continuing to eat the candy.

You can't stop and if you do you're in horrible pain and can't go to work, if you don't go to work you lose your job and if you want to keep working and not be homeless you keep eating the candy.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#47

Post by zimablue » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

ntumlin wrote: post #21

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but could someone explain the rationale for taxing gifts within a family? Ignoring the possibility of using it to circumvent an income tax, etc., my initial thought is that if my dad wants to give me $30,001 this year, or even $300,000 this year, that he's already paid taxes on it and it's not the government's business. I feel the same way about inheritance taxes, although tho…

What would really make sense -> a wealth tax What we have instead of that -> an estate tax What you need to make an estate tax work -> a gift tax

Wealth taxes and income taxes are kind of orthogonal. Why do you need a wealth tax? For the same reason you need a progressive income tax, power naturally accumulates and without a force pushing against that you slide towards feudalism. It's also important to note that wealth doesn't work like "I earned a pile of gold and if I do nothing I/my children will gradually deplete it". Wealth makes higher returns the more wealth you have, returns /above/ inflation, meaning that if you throw it into a managed fund it will make you money (on average) forever. So it's less like you own a pile of gold and more like you own a boatload of land and rent it to other people to passively get you money (equity same deal but more steps). So half the people are born into the world effectively owning not a pile of gold but shares on the other half! (Try earning a living without land, water, telecoms, probably soon air, which we allow people to own). If you don't think this is bad because of some sense of fairness and morality, accept that it's bad because "those who make peaceful revolution..." - eventually you get the French revolution.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#48

Post by user5994461 » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #26

ntumlin wrote: post #21

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but could someone explain the rationale for taxing gifts within a family? Ignoring the possibility of using it to circumvent an income tax, etc., my initial thought is that if my dad wants to give me $30,001 this year, or even $300,000 this year, that he's already paid taxes on it and it's not the government's business. I feel the same way about inheritance taxes, although tho…

At low levels, which aren't taxed, it's not going to affect anything. At high levels, like giving your kid ten billion dollars, you're making it impractical or impossible for others to advance economically. You're creating a class of people with indestructible inherited wealth that never have to work, that only have to collect interest and rent on the backs of everyone else. That's what inheritance tax and gift taxes…

I don't think so, this certainly has never been effective at that.

I'd say that historically billion dollars fortunes got diluted between the 10 children then the next generation, some of whom might actually burn it stupidly very quickly. Otherwise, it's diluted by wars and calamity.

However, there are no major disaster in the past decades and the number of children per family have dropped dramatically. It surely breaks the balance.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#49

Post by lotyrin » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #18

gowld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that people who have so much money to throw around waste their time on paper checks. Maybe it's intentional, in hopes that the child will feel a consequence of losing a check?

It's so she doesn't get the 28k at once and spend it one something stupid, like a new car or a designer handbag. Her parents might also be getting her bank statement monthly and check what is going on.

Monthly ACH transactions are surely an option instead though?

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#50

Post by secabeen » Mon, Oct 29, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

charlesdm wrote: post #44

secabeen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gift tax exists largely to prevent people from avoiding estate tax by gifting large sums of money just before death. That's why they're linked. If there was an estate tax and no gift tax, people would just give all their money away in the years leading up to death. The gift tax exemption is co-mingled with the estate tax exemption, so you can just think of the gift tax as pre-death estate taxes. As for why we hav…

Very much depends on the policy country. In Belgium you can gift any arbitrary amount ($10,000, $5m, $100m) through a notarial deed (up to a day) before death and pay 3% "gift tax". But the estate tax gets to 27% in the low hundreds of thousands.

Fascinating. Do you see a lot of deathbed transfers of wealth? Certainly, there are some illiquid assets that are going to be hard to transfer at deathbed in any country. In the US, you would see tons of deathbed transfer (they had to create a look-back period for gifts to prevent people from "improvishing" themselves via gifts to kids to qualify for government-paid nursing home care through medicaid). Is it just a cultural difference in Belgium, or something else?