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 tied to technology advancement (think the invention of TV, electronic audio devices, VR, video games), not creative output.
> 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 d…
Even marriage doesn't guarantee safety from a break-up, yet most marriages split finances. Suppose you thought with all sincerity you would get married, then helping your partner makes rational sense, especially if your partner is paying interest on a loan. That's your future joint account being drained.
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…
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.
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…
What about the part bashing her ex-boyfriend when she's married to a women!
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 c…
Definitely possible. Most wealthy people do transfers before death and avoid (most of) the estate tax. Normal people with a low net worth generally don't do this, because they are unaware of the avoidance mechanisms.
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 c…
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?
Setting up monthly ACH transactions is probably harder than setting up a monthly check through billpay at the sending bank. And the sending bank will cover the postage.
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…
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.
I disagree.
Of course there are many people with great jobs, that then developed a drug dependency that cost them.
However, I'd counter that initial poverty (financial, parental, societal, educational - take your pick) is something that provides a fertile group to grow addiction.
UBI would help remedy this.
And quite frankly if somebody wishes to use their UBI to pay towards a crack addiction, then it works out cheaper for society than cleaning up their mess.
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…
What about the part bashing her ex-boyfriend when she's married to a women!
> That’s a $22.4 million of unearned income for the children of the rich, whereas the working class get taxed on their first dollar earned. A person could at least argue that my parents earned the capital they live off of. But me? I didn’t actually earn it.
Nitpick, but this is not quite true. There is the Earned Income Credit, as well as various welfare payments that working class are entitled to.
For a single adult with no children EIC goes away at $15,000; that is a full time job at less than $6/hr. The 'working' class shouldn't need be dependent on welfare and assistance programs.