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My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

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Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#181

Post by TimTheTinker »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #78
soared wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point becomes even more true when you think about kids who grew up with not enough or even unhealthy foods. Their brains didn't have the resources to develop, so they are hamstrung from the start. Even more true when you see poorer neighborhoods near polluting factories and industrial zones.

Yes, I would really like to do something to put in a floor, so to speak. Something to help mitigate conditions for the people who are the most burdened by current circumstances. Other people seem to think that's charity or a bleeding heart or something. I see it as just insurance to protect everyone so that stumbling doesn't ruin your life permanently with little to no hope of ever finding your way back to a comforta…

> Other people seem to think that's charity or a bleeding heart or something. I see it as just [...]

I firmly believe that moral virtue and wisdom are inseparable. That is, to behave more virtuously or with more charity (in the old definition) is to benefit oneself more.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#182

Post by tomp »

isostatic wrote: post #101
kcorbitt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair question. Personally though, I come down on the exact opposite side of the question – all gifts should be highly taxed, with maybe a nominal tax-free allowance of a few thousand dollars. Making large gifts tax-free is just another big advantage that kids born to rich parents get over those born into less-fortunate circumstances. If we're in favor of equality of opportunity (and almost everyone claims to b…

It's not just rich kids that benefit, and it's not just direct gifts that benefit. If your parents live within commuting distance of London, you can probably take a very low paid job to get a rung on the ladder. Very few outgoings - no rent, no bills. £600/month for season ticket and nights out, and even on minimum wage you'll be saving £5k a year. If your parents live in say Devon or Yorkshire, you can't do that. Yo…

IIRC Switzerland is introducing a "homeowner's tax" - the equivalent to the tax your landlord would be paying on your rent if you were renting instead of owning - essentially, they're considering you're renting to yourself, so you need to pay the tax. Now that's pro-equality (ironically, for Switzerland).

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#183

Post by OJFord »

microtherion wrote: post #175
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…

> 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 Surely you agree that if he instead were to hire an extra gardener with the same $30,000, that money would be taxable as the gardener's income? So why should somebody who works for their money pay taxes on it, but not somebody who receives the money as a gift?

I assume therefore that you dutifully calculate and pay income tax on any and all birthday or Christmas presents?

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#184

Post by lordnacho »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #125
underpand wrote: post #51

I disagree with her premise that the government should fund people to have fulfilling creative careers. That's not how the world works. Creative outputs generally do not have 'efficienciecy' increases like other fields. Creative outputs are zero sum: people only have a constant amount of time to use to consume creative outputs and consumption time has already been saturated. Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are…

Arts is not mere entertainment. Students with an arts rich education: Have better grade point averages Score better on standardized tests in reading and math Have lower dropout rates http://www.artsactionfund.org/pages/why

Those seem to all be effects of being rich.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#185

Post by Diederich »

soared wrote: post #71

Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.

That you're posting this is excellent and admirable.

I personally take two approaches when I feel any kind of resentment toward people who seem to have enormous and/or unfair advantages.

I first consider my own objective advantages. Instead of being born into a solid middle class home in Southern California a few decades ago, I could have been born in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen recently, or almost anywhere in the world more than a century ago.

That I am here posting on Hacker News puts me in the (at least) top 1% most fortunate humans who have ever lived.

Secondly, I consistently walk in and practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism It's kind of my own version of it, I guess a modernized variant of what's found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

I've found that these perspectives help me with all kinds of psychological challenges.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#186

Post by InitialLastName »

vorpalhex wrote: post #53
clint wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except most people know that heroin isn't like candy. The side effects and consequences of snorting a few lines of cocaine isn't some secret.

You're right. Peoples' doctors rarely tell them to take anything that will risk them getting hooked on candy.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#187

Post by antisthenes »

soared wrote: post #71

Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.

The best I can tell you is - embrace your anger and try to channel it towards something productive for yourself.

Be reasonably selfish and busy, and it brings you too many negative emotions, simply ignore it. There are way too many rich people lacking self-awareness to get angry about.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#188

Post by sfohohoho »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #63

Plus, the parents apparently paid at least $250k in college tuition for her. So she has world class education, zero debt from it, and then this stipend on top of that . The stipend wouldn't go anywhere near as far if she were saddled with crushing student loans. I come from a more privileged background than I realized and that included better educational opportunities. I was in gifted programs as early as second grad…

"As a homemaker in my twenties.." Construction? Architect? Interior Designer?

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#189

Post by roymurdock »

Inconel wrote: post #133
crooked-v wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having absurd amounts of money certainly doesn't make bias go away, but it definitely makes such bias more bearable. I've been subject to numerous indignities due to "shopping while black", I've also gone hungry and had to resort to sleeping under overpasses, the two are incomparable. $28k a year in free money was an almost unimaginable sum to myself and many of my friends, most black but some white, when growing up.…

If/when you have kids, assuming the economy looks roughly the same when they graduate college, would you consider providing them a similar $28k/year stipend if they decided to pursue their goal in the arts/a non-lucrative career? Maybe non-monetary support such as having a place to live with you at home? Or would you want them to learn lessons the hard way?

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#190

Post by rpearl »

iguy wrote: post #171
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…

> an awful lot like UBI. But, I think the key difference is that ... parents ... have a standard for how it's spent. There's another important difference from UBI, that only a few kids now get this $28k. So being one of them, you can out-bid the others on having a nice apartment... whose price would otherwise rise. This applies to work too: she could get ahead artistically by being able to write full time. Ahead of t…

that's a simplistic analysis that doesn't really capture the whole effect a universal basic income might have. For one, with a livable basic income, the value of housing shifts somewhat--since there's not essentially a requirement to have a job, the demand for housing-near-jobs changes. It is hard to predict exactly what direction that might shift in.

The competitive environment around an artistic endeavor changes too--you have the ability to experiment and fail and not be forced out entirely, since you can fall back and change things up without having to worry about finding a job. And it might not be the case that everyone looking for a creative outlet is looking to make it into a living.

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