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 grade and had several college-equivalent math classes through my high school by the time I graduated high school. I took more math in high school for free than a lot of people with (non STEM) bachelor's degrees take.

As a homemaker in my twenties, I kept running tallies in my head for every single item that went into my shopping cart. I never bothered to carry a calculator. I could run the numbers in my head faster than other people could punch it into a calculator.

So much knowledge and training makes sparse material resources stretch a lot further than people stumbling their way forward with limited finances and less education, fewer solid mental models to inform their decisions, etc.

I mean, I appreciate that she wrote the article and she's not wrong, but I think the issue runs so much deeper than she's indicating. Just because I had smart parents who knew a lot, I had a leg up before I ever started school at age five. And the gulf between me and most of my age mates only grew the older I got.

If that were the issue, it's not racist. The response isn't based on the speaker's race but on the content. But it arguably could be 'jumping to a conclusion'.

But I don't think it's that either. The comment said that such statements are often thinly-veiled racism, which is true. Racism is infrequently expressed literally; there is a lot of 'dog whistle' communication and policies. For example, there's a semi-famous interview with a Republican strategist who said that, during the Reagan years, they realized they could no longer make outright racist statements, so they adopted school busing as an issue and expected that everyone would get the message - they couldn't outright say, 'you don't want your kids going to school with black kids, and we're the party that will stop that kind of thing', but they could talk about busing.

Today, when Republican state governments take away voting locations in minority areas, and create ID and registration requirements that disproportionately affect minorities, it's pretty thinly veiled. In fact, those are some of the same tactics were used before the Voting Rights Act (the tactics returned immediately after Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated parts of the Act). Some Republicans openly say that it's to prevent Democrats from voting.

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 comfortable life. I also see it as insurance against bloody revolution.

My opinion: Tech giants planning to flee to New Zealand when the Zombie Apocalypse finally hits are fools. A plan to ruin the climate and destroy the social fabric to line their pockets so they can live out the rest of their days in a bunker is lunacy. Why not just, you know, not be so monstrously greedy and, instead, leave the world intact so you can have a better quality of life than that?

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.

If the street isn't full of smelly, desperately poor people with no home, you don't have to live in terror of being panhandled by them while imagining it will go much worse places than that.

If I make the world a better place, I get to live in a better place. Simple.

Also, even if you aren't "living in terror", it still makes you feel instinctually guilty to see people less-advantaged than you, doesn't it? And I would posit that that feeling makes you less productive. (Just like e.g. feeling guilty that you did something bad to your SO makes you less likely to engage in fun activities with them, which decreases the total experienced quality of the relationship for both parties.)

So, even for someone who lived entirely in the safety of suburbia, ending homelessness might have positive knock-on effects for the productivity of non-homeless people due to decreased guilt (and fear), and thereby positive effects on the local economy, and thereby the local tax base, and thereby would improve local civic infrastructure et al. (Oh, and also, people that didn't want to move into the city—like you!—would now move into the city, also increasing the local tax base.)

Or, to put that another way: moving municipal funding from sidewalks to homeless shelters, may increase the total municipal budget, thereby allowing the city to provide both sidewalks and homeless shelters. "The entire world's burdens" never enters into the equation.

It doesn't have very many, actually. I'd say more about why not, but that would get into self-doxx territory.

> So now you also e.g. have to bring lunches rather than taking advantage of the restaurants nearby to work. Kind of constraining.

Wat? Independently of the previous item, I pack lunches because a packed lunch costs me a little under a tenth of a restaurant lunch nearby. Restaurants are a twice-a-month type of luxury, and I can't imagine throwing away that kind of dosh on a daily basis.

> Also, even if you aren't "living in terror", it still makes you feel instinctually guilty to see people less-advantaged than you, doesn't it?

In a word: no.

> (Oh, and also, people that didn't want to move into the city—like you!—would now move into the city, also increasing the local tax base.)

I like my place for other reasons. Top among them: it's less than half as expensive as an apartment that's near my workplace, yet it's still well within commuting range and is perfectly nice by my standards.

Aaand I don't really see that as a problem to solve; I like car ownership for other reasons, and given that I own a car, I want to use that situation to decrease other expenses to the greatest extent possible.

> they are just sure the homeless are all drug addicts and thieves

/upthread

> but martial arts aren't much of a solution for malaise that isn't in the form of physical direct combat.

Attempted theft doesn't qualify? Most interesting.

> Attempted theft doesn't qualify? Most interesting.

Doesn't qualify as what? My statement about martial arts was that it's not an effective solution for problems that aren't in the "form of physical direct combat". As in, there are other problems and negative consequences that don't manifest themselves in violent personal crimes.

Because the entire system is built on greed. In capitalism, if you're not greedy, someone else will be, and you lose out.

Sadly there doesn't seem to be an easily accessible english translation. If you read French you should go for it, as it is arguably one of its most important and underrated work.

I found this companion/introduction to Bourdieu's work but I cannot vouch for it: https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Power-Sociology-Pierre-Bourdi...

Some people do see success later in life after sorting their issues in early life.

My life is a very mixed bag, with both big assets and big issues. I'm hoping to have a few nice years yet before I check out. I've spent a lot of years sorting my crap.

My parents gave me $3000 for the down-payment on my first house, which cost $100k. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy a house. But I bought instead of renting and ended up selling it for $200k years later. That was a big financial win early on and meant I was never in debt again.

My financial situation at the time was barely-making-ends-meet, so I had to sell the house to recover the equity to buy a car and move across the country when I was transferred.

Had my parents given me $30k as a one-time gift, I wouldn't have had to sell that house at all and would have rented it out in perpetuity. That would have been about $1000k a month of income for me, in addition to keeping the equity in the house.

I've resisted spending money on a lot of things like, say, home renovations, new cars, etc. until I felt like I was paying for it solely from interest earned on investments or the purchase was an absolute necessity. The only reason I was able to start investing at a young age, on a very small income, was the sale of that house. Those savings have compounded, but more importantly I've always had enough cash to cover incidental expenses and that's enabled me to continue investing.

Even small gifts can lift you out of a cycle of poverty. $3000 at the right time made a dramatic difference in my financial situation and will for the rest of my life. But $30k at the right time would ultimately have been worth about an extra $500k to me twenty years later.

$30k a year like in the article would have just ensured I was as rich as my parents. That would have all gone to investments.

I think this is really insightful. The difference between being truly poor and just being a broke college student is that while a broke student may not have any money on their pocket, they can always call it quits if things just too hard.* Makes me think more carefully when people claim "hey I know what it's like to be poor too - I had no money at college!"

*assuming they're not also truly poor.

This was just after the mortgage crash, so the fact that I could make a cash offer probably saved me $50-$100k on the price of the house alone.

In both cases, they just exercised an existing line of credit, so just them extending to us the credit they already received was sufficient to save us an absurd amount of money.

Quite a ROI.

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 intrinsic characteristic in society privileges.

$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. It's my general experience that people at this level of privilege don't have the ability to truly understand how privilege, or the lack thereof, impacts the entirety of your existence, and should refrain from castigating others for their perceived privileges, it's splitting hairs at this point.

As to a specific number, my gut feeling tells me $28K seems rather excessive. That's more money annually than I and most of my friends made in total yearly wages for a good chunk of our adult lives, and we all worked rather dutifully. I'm not entirely convinced that the creation of art requires such sums. And $28k could certainly help a lot of other children in need.

In any case, I'd like to think one of the most satisfying aspects of parenting is watching a child transform into an adult, I'm unsure whether a perpetual yearly stipend equal to the wages of large segments of this country is the best method to achieve that goal. But assuming my child was the recipient of such privilege, I'd hope I would have taught them the humility to understand just how privileged they were, and in general refrain from criticism based on generalities.

(Sorry to hijack) As a former foster parent, and now an adoptive parent, and a hopeful future foster parent: I strongly encourage anyone who is able to get involved to do so. There are so many kids who need the help only foster parents can give. There will never be a "perfect" time, trust me. But it makes me so sad to hear stories like yours about kids who are homeless :(

I come from a more privileged background with a lot of family support, so I can see the good (stability and guidance allows you to learn, socialize, grow, stay out of the death spiral of the penal/judicial system) and bad (overdependence on parents, growing up in a bubble, not learning lessons in a visceral/hard way that will stick with you, mistaking luck and hard work) from where I've come from.

I appreciate you sharing your personal perspective, and I agree. I wouldn't want to provide any monetary support for my children post university (unless it is more of a business transaction with stipulations on what it can be spent on/payback period), but would want to provide stability and travel/educational experiences growing up, and be there when shit happens as it usually does

Per your privilege comment, travel has been the most helpful for me to get outside of my bubble, so I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like the fish swimming in water parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html

I have two daughters, who are five and ten years old. I do not intend to pay for their higher education, and I don't intend to give them anything resembling a "stipend" when they go off on their own. Instead, I expect them to build financial independence from my wife and I as quickly as they can, and am very active in making sure they have the skills and character to do so.

Now, that said, we are on track to being able to offer the kind of support in the article. If one (or both) of my children come to me with a plan to pursue college, reasonable projections of how much it will cost, and a timeline that shows a good ROI on that investment, then we'll reconsider. It will be a serious financial decision, though, and one that I expect them to put a lot of thought and planning into. It's entirely possible that my wife and I will simply pay for our children's tuition, living expenses, down payment on a home, or even just buy them a home outright - but any and all financial assistance we provide them will be predicated on one of two things: actual need, or net benefit.

I want my children to understand the weight of the financial decisions they make in early adulthood. I want them to understand and to feel the consequences of those decisions - but they are my children, and I won't let them place themselves in serious danger because of their early mistakes.

I've gone through this myself. I hope my children have an easier time than I did transitioning from childhood to adulthood, but if not, I plan to handle it in a way similar to that of my own parents. In 2004, I had lost a full academic scholarship to a state school and was suffering from clinical depression. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend (now wife), and my bank account was almost always negative. I worked overnights stocking shelves at a grocery store and my girlfriend was a retail clerk. My parents were there for me - they made sure I had reliable (not "nice", but reliable) transportation, made sure I had a basic cellphone that wasn't always getting disconnected, and were always willing to help make ends meet if there wasn't enough money for food at the end of the month.

From 2002, when I started college, to about 2005, I was barely able to function as an adult. In August of 2005 I married, and started putting my life together. I moved back to my home town in 2006 with a plan to get a career-oriented job at the only decent employer in the area, based mostly on my reputation as a nerd and the fact that I knew many people who worked there, since it was a small town. In 2007 I landed an hourly job there, and worked my way up. We had a daughter in 2008, moved to Virginia for a better job in 2013, had another daughter there, and moved back once more in 2018 to work remotely.

Even today, if I were to experience real financial stress, my parents are there for me. I haven't had to rely on them for many years now, but they're there. I'm 34, and only now am I to the point where I feel like I have an adequate safety net built for myself to withstand a significant event - I see no way I could have built that without my parents' being there for me.

It isn't only about the money. No matter what happens to me or my finances, we will not be homeless as long as my extended family is alive. The opposite is also true; my wife is an only child and her parents are beginning to get to the point in their lives where they're going to need more assistance. I'm taking on that responsibility as I can, and within the next ten years I fully expect that I will be responsible for making sure they're comfortable in their retirement.

To me, this is how families are supposed to work. It's how they've worked for generations. Parents sacrifice to enrich their children's lives, and children do what they can to honor that sacrifice. Extended family is always there to help with immediate issues, whether it raising a barn, helping someone move, or driving someone to a doctor's appointment three hours away. It works, I embrace it, and have made it a central tenet of my life.

What was the turning point for you in deciding to put your life together (if there was one single moment or realization)? Was it getting married and having the responsibility for taking care of your new, young family? It must have been hard to dig out of depression in what probably seemed like a hopeless situation at the time.

I, as a fairly non-descript white guy, am always worried when out walking near a single female that she might be afraid of me and what I might do and take steps to help alleviate that (walk slower, etc.).

I mean, it seems like the most reasonable course of action. Sure, I'm never going to confront/assault/rape anyone, but the 5'2", 110 lbs woman walking in front of me on the street? She has no clue. How hard is it for me to slow down half a step and give her some relief?

Why would dropping back give relief? Seems to me, moving to the side as far as the sidewalk, etc., permits then accelerating to pass so you aren't behind is the better course of action.

I guess my point is that I feel like you are doing something wrong if you /aren't/ considering how those around you are interpreting your actions. It's like the people at the grocery store who blindly stop their carts in the middle of the aisle and walk away to browse...seriously? You didn't consider how your actions impacted anyone else at all?

stalk gerund or present participle: stalking: pursue or approach stealthily.

synonyms:creep up on, trail, follow, shadow, track down, go after, be after, course, hunt;More

>Having even absurd amounts of money doesn't make bias just go away.

And having white skin and a penis doesn't make inequality go away either.

https://www.prb.org/us-inequality-poverty/

Yes, black Americans do have worse outcomes than white Americans.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/economics/four-f...

However, we should not be splitting hairs over who has it worse or bickering about how to make poor dumb white families pay for the injustices of systemic racism that they had no hand in creating or maintaining.

There are a lot of poor people in America and they all deserve our help. If we continue to pick and choose who we help based on what minority sub-group makes the most noise we will only accomplish division. If the top 1% can increase their wealth by 20%in a year then we can also improve schools, health care, and access to affordable financing for all poor people. Instead we get divisive platitudes that alienate poor whites and never actually help poor blacks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/concen...

We should start by funding public schools equally by head count instead of from property taxes.

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-unequal-school-funding...

Then we should probably end the inane war on drugs, fix healthcare, free the slaves filling prisons that do not pose a danger to society, overturn CU, and build some affordable damn houses.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

I once said similar things. Then I learned that MLK was told similar things then - he was constantly told that he was creating trouble by inflaming things. I strongly encourage you to read his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" to see not only that the same things have always been said, but his response - it transformed my understanding of these issues.

> partially healed wounds ...

> re-opening those wounds and undoing any healing that had already begun.

I think we should question the assumptions that the wounds were as healed as perhaps is widely thought by people who aren't in minorities. What makes you say they are healed to the extent you think? When I ask people who have those experiences personally and directly, they almost always have a starkly different view of the amount of 'healing'.

Part of MLK's response is that, unless compelled to address it, people don't take them seriously and they linger. Racism has lingered in the U.S. for centuries. IME, people who aren't directly affected by problems tend to project their experiences onto them - they unconsciously infer that 'I don't see bad things' means 'it's not bad'.

Finally, a bit of a tangent: MLK is often adopted by white Americans because his message, misunderstood, makes them feel comfortable. MLK was very much about making people uncomfortable, and he believed (again, see the Letter) that that was the only way to foster change. (And IIRC, even after the Voting Rights Act, surveys showed that MLK had more people in the U.S. who thought negatively about him than positively.)

A sad fact of HN is that there are no voices of African-Americans, or at least very few and they don't share their experiences (not that I blame them; it's a hostile place). Other people with no experience like to share their opinions, but that is as valuable as me talking about what it's like to work at Microsoft - I've never worked there so my opinion isn't worth a lot. The lack of people experienced in this subject is both an outcome of generations of discrimination - African-American families often lack the wealth, income, and educational history associated with higher education and SV jobs - and a cause of it: We don't understand the problems. We're just BSing in the dark.

Also, I think its important to consider your comments holistically when seeing how they are received by the community. Of course you believe you comment communicates one thing, but in addition to that you have tone, other claims, and defenses. Any of which can result in a downvote.

To be clear, I wasn't asking why that particular comment was downvoted; I'm talking about a much broader pattern.

I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, porcelain, etc., etc., etc.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences: the art of legislation and administration and negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other arts. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

You need to be able to feed your village, before you can have artisans.

You need to establish the basic needs before you can have a renaissance, and having everyone be a soldier when the borders haven't changed in 150 years doesn't make economic sense. "Kill them with kindness" and 2 trillion in exported goods instead.

/s

As far as I can tell, you are the only one inferring that studying architecture and similar civilized topics equates to leisure and irresponsibility. That doesn't make sense to my mind. Here's my context for such remarks:

My dad grew up in the Great Depression. He fought in two wars. He was awarded a purple heart. My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and its aftermath.

They raised me well with values like eating well matters and petty conflicts aren't worth being grudging over. I spent nearly 6 years camping -- aka homeless -- to get myself healthier while the world heaped verbal abuse upon me for it and called me a liar and crazy.

My dream job is in the urban planning and economic development sphere. Among other things, I would love to help artists and writers and others figure out how to monetize their work and live well, even if they don't make scads of money. I would like to help homeless people access an earned income.

Before my life was derailed, I was a military wife and homeschooling parent. I would like to return to that kind of role, but on a larger scale. I would like to help raise up the region wherein I live.

Perhaps I shall figure out how to pull that off. I don't imagine it will involve a lot of leisure, though it will be the antithesis of war, even the antidote to it. Though I assume you won't see what I see there. Peace is not merely the absence of conflict. Trying to put it into words tends to be elusive.

I continue to be largely dismissed, not given support, have doors slammed in my face, etc. I also run multiple websites with useful info for people with big problems. Once in a while, someone kicks a few bucks my way and I get a smidgen of Patreon support.

So perhaps it can be grown. Perhaps this small candle I've lit in the dark void of my life can become a bonfire for others less fortunate than I am whose parents didn't similarly arm them for the battle ahead in life.

So, by such definition, if everyone is free to run around and do whatever activity they want, then either every activity is economically valued and thereby non-leisure... Or everyone can somehow take part in leisurely activities without regard to making a living. Which could certainly be seen as an operation definition for "leisure-filled utopia".

[0] Not GP. This is me possibly putting words into GP's mouth, while also asserting that these are not my words.

I hope this doesn't start any arguments, but that's just my take on it and I'm open to hearing why it's a bad idea.

Edit: I appreciate the responses, they've cleared up some misconceptions I had and moved my viewpoint a bit.

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 have an estate tax, the general idea is that oligarcies and plutocracies are bad; that while you should be able to give your kids (and grandkids, and even great-grandkids) every leg up in the world, they should have to work and contribute to society; that the pernicious effects of wealth snowball as generations pass; etc. Add to that the fact that an estate tax has the least negative impact on the taxpayer (and their spouse), given that the taxpayer is dead, it's a pretty good tax. Especially now that the exemption is so high, I feel like the value proposition is pretty good.

Consider Grandpa buys an asset; as company, land, a football team, whatever. 50 years later Grandpa dies and his will transfers it to you. If Grandpa had sold it the day before he died and given you the stack of money, he would have been taxed on the appreciation of the investment. If there were no estate tax, then that appreciation would never be exposed to taxation as long as families pass their assets down to heirs.

The estate tax isn't so much about controlling plutocracy as it is leveling the taxation field between people who buy and sell assets and people with so many assets that they don't need to sell them.

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

$1k, $100k, $100MM, any amount.

A recent (2011) policy change, remains to be seen how it will play out.

No, the reason we have an estate tax with broad exemptions rather than taxing generational transfers as income is the general idea in the ruling class that oligarchies and plutocracy are good.

I feel like the exact situation that our country is in right now is the exact outcome I would fear from such a situation as you describe.

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 seek to disrupt.

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.

Throughout history and across most cultures, it was usually the first born son who got the father's legacy and the lion's share of the wealth. It's why it was so important for wives ( especially of the powerful and wealthy ) to produce a male heir. Sometimes it was a matter of life or death. We all know of king henry's wives.

"When Anne failed to quickly produce a male heir, her only son being stillborn, the King grew tired of her, annulled their marriage, and a plot was hatched by Thomas Cromwell to execute her."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wives_of_King_Henry_VI...

That wealth is invested in profitable ventures that either create benefits in the system (assuming rational actors) or 2) lose value due to poor choices.

Capital is rewarded because the investors are taking opportunity cost risks that advance the sum value of humanity's wealth.

It's not investing in "profitable ventures" that "create benefits", it's tied up in businesses they inherited, it's squirreled away in tax havens, it's spent on lavish properties, club memberships, expensive cars, and tuition for their children. If you're lucky a tiny fraction of that trickles down in the form of scholarships or charity work.

Then that money generates enough of a return that their kids can inherit billions in turn and the cycle repeats.

There's a point at which you have so much money that you will no longer ever have to work, but your kids will never have to work, and neither will their kids. It has such a heavy gravitational pull that in the long run there's no way you can lose.

If you have even half competent people managing your money an estate worth $10B can pretty much exist forever and grow at or beyond the rate of inflation even when extravagantly luxurious cost of living expenses are deducted. A million dollar a month allowance won't put a dent in this money.

The interesting question is, like always politics, how to balance those trade-offs for bests outcomes.

Yes, that means both giving parents the chance to help their kids while also not having a disillusioned crowd without perspective demanding to tear down society in favor of whatever promises to be better. And yes, that requires some degree of wealth redistribution like decent public eduction.

These ultra-rich people can dictate terms, can sway policy, in ways you can't even fathom. The person earning almost nothing has no say, no vote, no power at all.

There's no benefit to humanity when all their money is being squirreled away in offshore accounts where it creates only a handful of jobs.

When you're talking about giving something to your kids you usually mean, at most, a million dollars. Estates under $4M aren't even taxed. It's only in cases beyond that where the taxes get stiffer, and they should.

You don't want what happened in Europe where for hundreds of years the same families control everything with almost zero change in the status-quo despite countries and empires coming and going, long, vicious wars, famines, disease and conquest. Money doesn't move down the chain unless you make it move.

Trickle down is what the ultra-rich tell people is going to happen so they can hoover up more money.

In a perfectly ideal society every child born has the same opportunity as any other, they're all free to make it or blow it. That's obviously never going to happen, but letting the ultra-rich maintain their wealth indefinitely creates a permanent and insurmountable advantage for that class to the detriment of everyone else.

  assuming rational actor

And the vast majority of that advance in humanity's sum wealth accrues in the hands of those very capitalists. How peculiar!

I’d be paying rent to someone, whether they have $1 or $1B to their name.

Zero-sum is one perspective, but not one that I subscribe to.

Does your neighbor having $10b of stuff make you better or worse off than if than if there's $10b of stuff at the bottom of the ocean?

Image that the economy is a field of wheat. It grows bigger every year as workers become more productive and learn how to fertilize and water more efficiently. At the end of the season, everyone gets a chance to head into the field and collect some wheat.

Some people don't have any tools. They pick the wheat by hand. Others have managed to fashion scythes and can collect a little more. But, the kid who inherited $10b has a fleet of combines that race into the field and collect 75% of the wheat in a flash.

The economy (wheat field) grew bigger and everyone had a little more wheat but the $10b kid got way more than the others and can now buy another combine for the fleet to get even more next year.

Without some rational tax on inherited wealth, we will create (and already have created in the United States) a plutocracy.

Someone comes in with a tractor plough and plants twice a much wheat as last year. There is now lots of food in the economy and bread and pies.

In fact, the tractor plough plants so much wheat year after year that a few of the farmers stop planting and start working on building and maintaining tractors.

Eventually the tractors do well enough and wheat is cheap enough that the some farmers can afford to raise wheat-fed cattle.

Your analogy is so far off the mark on how wealth is created, it's laughable.

$10 billion in family wealth is almost never held in cash, it's invested in companies, land, and other ventures. Wherever an investment is made, people are put to work collecting salaries and benefits, generally speaking.

You've made a gross oversimplification, and a misleading one at that.

No, not misleading at all. I never said the $10b kid had cash. Obviously, wheat expires (cash) and would be converted into another form of wealth. In this instance, he buys combines which have to be built by someone. You might even say he's a job creator.

But.... and this is a big but.... all investments are not job creating investments. Financial services, speculative investments, automation and robotics that increase worker efficiency but reduce the number of workers. I would argue that the efficiency of $10b in capital in the hands of a single person is far, far less efficient than $10b distributed across many people who use it to consume goods directly. The control of wealth by a small group produces a system where the rules favor the wealthy minority at the expense of the less wealthy. You can only go so far before the guillotines come out and the people take matters into their own hands.

It's also a problem if you view it as a symptom of a system that isn't functioning well at giving everyone a fair shake in life, in participating economically or politically.

The number itself isn't a problem, it's what it causes and what it's caused by that's the problem.

Get money out of politics, get everyone a vote and the capacity to use it, make sure everyone's fed and housed adequately, everyone has access to health care and education ... make it so we're living in a Star Trek TNG universe, and I don't care about how much the next guy has either.

Until then, it's worth looking at, at least the very least to help us to see why we don't have all those nice things.

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.

Also, both limits tend to go up over time, so it's a moving target.

What really matters is the economic consequences of these taxes. For example, you can't make sales tax too high because it discourages people from buying things and hurts poor people disproportionately. There isn't much of a economic downside to taxing large gifts. Sometimes taxing an inheritance runs the risk of closing a family owned farm or business.

The notion of "the family" is not a thing unless you're talking about dependents. Transferring money from one person to another is income for the person receiving the money. It's not being taxed twice, just once per time "earned". (and it's not even taxed until the limit per the comment in this thread! TIL)

To allow for these kinds of gifts they limit the amount that is tax free. Allowing unlimited gifts to "family" would likely result in all businesses being "family" businesses, etc etc. Lots of downstream ramifications.

So this seems to answer "how do I help my kids a reasonable amount without being taxed without creating a giant dodge"

Giant dodges are best done using LLCs and ownership by other family members. Typically this overhead costs a lot more to manage though, so it's only available to the super wealthy.

I kid here, a bit. But it's clearly also something being done quite often.

> I kid here

Indeed, you don't have to be super wealthy to dodge taxes.

In the UK some people who consider themselves poor will happily talk to a solicter about "inheritance tax planning".

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/inheritance-tax-pla...

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?

But to your point, a gift tax also stops people from “gifting” their gardener and avoiding taxes on both ends.

I stipulated that it is the SAME money. In both cases, it has "already been taxed" by the person spending the money. Yet in one case, the person receiving the money pays taxes, in the other, they do not.

So i would argue they aren’t the same.

In the UK there's inheritance tax to pay over a threshold if you die within 7 years of making the gift, but otherwise there's not a 'gift tax'.

The situation you describe still isn't the same as declaring it as income though - assuming you are working, if it were taxed at your marginal rate of income tax you'd already be over any threshold no matter how small the gift.

Could you explain the rationale for excluding such unearned income, other than privileging generational wealth against wealth earned by personal work and investment?

> 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.

He's paid tax on his income. When it goes to you, you are the then receiving income—whether it's as a gift or a payment for goods or services, whether you are in the family or not.

Favoring one of those situations over another is just that, favoritism; it's not justifiable by “already paid” logic in one case but not the others.

If I buy a round of drinks, do people have to pay tax?

(I assume there's some minimum threshold)

If I give someone $5 for their birthday, they should report it but won't. If I give them $50,000 for their birthday, they better report it or risk the IRS finding out and coming after them.

Ideally, probably, but even in a system which tries to mitigate the advantage of generational wealth created by the current favorable regime of gift and inheritance tax by a purer income tax, the friction of taxing de minimis personal gifts as income to recipients is something you probably want to avoid.

Taxes are usually paid each time money moves hands.

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 be), much stronger inheritance/gift taxes seem like a really obvious place to start.

I wrote some thoughts on this a few months ago: https://corbt.com/posts/2018/04/25/a-100-estate-tax.html

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. You'll be paying £1k a month just for rent.

[1] https://lenews.ch/2017/08/24/a-swiss-parliamentary-commissio...

The problem with that notion is that people often talk around each other W.R.T what it actually means. For some people, the only value of that opportunity is to be able to create a better life for their kids, often through inheritance.

But federal inheritance tax doesn't kick in until you leave over 11 million to an individual, and many states don't have an inheritance tax, so most people won't need to worry about this. (Not legal advice, states differ, etc.)

you can't just ignore the reason why it exist.

Having just gone through this, your parents must be really, really wealthy if your inheritance taxes are high. You can inherit many millions of dollars and not pay a cent in taxes in the US.

And there are clever tricks to bump up the limits. The two parents can gift to the child/spouse separately to give 4x the gift tax limit.

The US government has been the pet toy of a small cadre of powerful families for a long time now.

We need the government to stop backing these bad loans. Any bank that makes enough bad loans will eventually fail, so they try and avoid it. I'd rather see someone say "Well, you can borrow $50k for an arts degree because that's all it's worth" ... Then we'll start to see the market fulfill college options at reasonable prices for artists.

I wouldn't be so sure, these days (post 2008). _Especially_ if it's a big bank.

I can only imagine what someone in chronic lifelong pain must feel about me.

I can just jump up and run whenever, wherever I feel like and my prescription drug bill each month is zero. Talk about an unfair advantage in life!

My teeth are horrible. A combination of genetics and an adolescence/pre-college diet of soda, I'd imagine. We're talking trips to the dentist every month or two for fillings, replacing fillings, the odd root canal here and there.

This year was the first year I've ever "used up" all of my dental insurance. Let's count my blessings, first of all: Holy shit am I lucky to have a world class dentist a few blocks away. Holy shit am I lucky to even have dental insurance at all, provided by my employer.

I recently scheduled a root canal for a tooth that's been causing tremendous pain. Crippling, anything touches the tooth and I black out for a couple seconds, creeping into a constant stabbing headache, barely kept under control by OTC pain meds, kind of pain. Without dental insurance, it'll be $600. Can I afford to do this every month? Heck no, this will be the last time I go to the dentist until insurance comes back in 2019.

But how fortunate am I that I can afford to pay for this once? Imagine being told it would cost even a few hundred at a cheaper dentist, you don't have insurance, and you're already counting dollars to make ends meet. Imagine being born in a third world country and you've got this problem; at best you'd just pull the tooth, which is going to create more problems, hopefully better problems.

During one dental procedure in the past I was prescribed Vicodin, 30 pills. I went to the pharmacist; that'll be $3 with insurance. What?!

Pain is a universal human feeling that, if you take a moment, offers an amazing moment of reflection and humility about how lucky most of us are that it's temporary. If you have chronic migraines, or joint pain, or diabetes, or anything like that: it affects everything you can do in life. You can't think clearly. You can't work as hard as your potential. This impacts all the future earnings you'll ever earn.

If you're generally healthy, generally pain free, and have access to healthcare when you're not, you're literally among the luckiest people on the planet.

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.

disclaimer: Just as resentful as you are. I paid for college by enlisting in the military. Glad I could do my little part to keep the country safer for people like her...see? There is that resentment coming on again, it's such a tricky bastard of a feeling.

I grew up with a number of people who were far more well off than me. One kid made more interest on his inheritance -most of it hadn't even arrived yet- than my parents made all year.

There's pros and cons. The pros you know about. Skiing holidays, expensive cars, everything you can point your finger at.

The cons are a bit more subtle. The feeling of never being able to deserve anything. The feeling of not participating in the struggle of life, which every living creature other than a rich human kid has. Face it, it doesn't matter how yo do on that math test. Frustration when inevitably some kid you know without all the advantages does better than you.

Also concretely rich people are no happier than poor people, above some quite low limit. It's not like the rich kids I knew were much happier than the poor ones, they could be grumpy as well. In fact it seems to be the case that barely anything affects how happy people feel, as long as they've got more than a baseline.

So even if you somehow managed to swap financial situations with some silver spoon kid, chances are you'd not feel any better.

I think that the experiences diverge the most as adults actually. Kids don't have many responsibilities and most go to school. Minimum wage jobs as a teen can actually be fun. You're surrounded by coworkers your age and everyone slacks off. It's low pressure in the sense that you and your coworkers don't care about getting promoted or fired.

As adults, rich kids can choose fulfilling, fun careers (or none at all). The non-rich slave in unfulfilling, soul sucking jobs, constantly worrying about money and retirement.

It's not the cool toys or expensive experiences that make wealth attractive. It's the ability to not work a 9-5 job without the fear of starvation or poverty.

The trick is to look down sometimes too, you're probably more fortunate than some people, should they resent you for it? (the answer could be yes, in which case your resentment is perfectly reasonable, but so is someone else's resentment of you)

Mine is basically... The world is decidedly unfair. Even though some people, e.g. trust fund kids, are dealt pocket aces at birth, you can't be angered because you'd be grateful it if happened to you. However, being in this class comes with obligations. These people should be aware of this obligation and they should be striving to produce great things with their means. If they don't, then they don't deserve their advantages, they should illicit frustration, and they should be maligned.

The trick is to recognize what you do and do not have control over. In relativity you do not control as much as you think.

We all die the same in the end, so what really matters?

Jesus said:

“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

21 “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God

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.

Secondly, poverty is not a lack of money or material wealth. That is part of it and is definitely a symptom. But actual poverty is a culture and a set of habits that easily pass from one generation to the next. The idea that just injecting money at the lowest levels of society will fix this is absurd. This is a multi generational problem that will not be fixed with money. I don’t know a better answer, but I think about it a lot.

Dislike it all you want, but observing realities that are often shared within blocks of people (as opposed to randomly distributed across every slice of every group of population) and daring to discuss them (out loud!) in a moderately visible venue should not be seen as problematic, and certainly not as "a brutally racist mentality".

Having white skin though gives you an advantage in a system that prioritises whiteness over other colours. Its not racist to discuss this.

How’s you’re whiteness helping you now?

What percentage of farm land in South Africa is currently owned by white people? Answer: 72% How does that compare to the demographic breakdown of the South African population? Answer: White people make up 9% of the population. Question: In what year did SA repeal The Natives Land Act of 1913? Answer: 1991. What did The Natives Land Act of 1913 do? Among other things, it made it illegal for non-whites to buy land except from other non-whites. What percentage of South African farmland was owned by white people in 1994? Answer: 86% So how much land could non-white farmers own just because they weren't white? Very little. How long ago? Very recently.

So if you're a white South African farmer, your enduring privilege, like it or not, is that non-white South African farmers were almost certainly not allowed to buy that land until very recently. It's much harder to be a farmer without land. So then we need to ask, how did this white farmer in South Africa get there?

It's important to recognize that your life is structured, harmed, hindered, buoyed, and improved by violence that happened even before you were born, that you had no control over, and that you would even not choose to support today. That doesn't mean you live in a vacuum.

Just as poverty isn't about lack of money per se, white privilege mostly isn't about money per se either. As you say, the money (or lack thereof) is really a symptom.

On the other hand, I also have a predominantly Caucasian genetic disorder classified as a dread disease because of the horrors it inflicts upon your life. So being white absolutely comes with a very huge downside for me.

I mostly don't get a lot of sympathy for that. I mostly get attacked and told I'm making crap up.

I wish we could default to seeing each other as spirits in a material world and try harder to find solutions, not scapegoats.

/2cents

Wow.

Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are tied to technology advancement (think the invention of TV, electronic audio devices, VR, video games), not creative output.

It's REALLY easy to wind up with a dismissive attitude towards the arts growing up and working in tech but never forget how much there's a feedback loop between artistic exploration and technological advances and how even a modern 'clean' design encodes a lot of artistic choice behind the scenes.

cities would be terrible without public art for example, they would be dull, gray concrete silos of empty existance.

> Efficiency upgrades for entertainment are tied to technology advancement (think the invention of TV, electronic audio devices, VR, video games), not creative output.

I was largely reacting to these two lines though I also think if we're talking about large scale subsidization, ie a basic income or whatever it may become, saying we shouldn't subsidize something must mean it's significantly less valuable than other work. (Which since we're on HN generally means tech is pretty high up on the value list)

But back to the meat of what I was responding to. I disagree that entertainment is zero sum, even if a creative work isn't consumed by a particular person directly it still goes into the cultural millieu and contributes to the texture of society where it can enrich indirectly.

And the second line just reeked of dismissing the increased space for expression driven by new technologies in favor of looking at just the raw amount of consumption that can be done.

I agree that diversity of entertainment options is important, but we're well past the saturation point even without subsidization.

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

That's not how it works right now. Some want that future and are working to make it happen.

Edit : as an example, the explosion of lines of code accessible on the internet is a new form of expression for some people. They are not paid to do it, yet they do it anyway, because they enjoy it. Not all that code is consumed, however.

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.

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.

The physical dependence is the same, and there are 4 times as many deaths that can be linked to sugar as drugs per year in the US.

The only difference is that heroin is illegal and costs a lot more than candy.

Secondly, sugar use is extremely widespread. Much more so than use of heroin. Few people avoid ingesting some sugar.

Even if there were 4 times as many deaths confirmed to be squarely caused by sugar, that alone shows sugar to be far safer, since it has far more than 4 times the users.

But never mind, let's look at, oh, the lethal dose (LD50) info. For sugar, that is supposedly something like 30 g/kg. The LD50 for heroin (intravenous) is something like 20 mg/kg: more than a thousand times less.

Plus there is copious sugar in your bloodstream without which you'd be in hypoglycemic shock leading to death.

Correct - the same goes for "Linked to drugs" and "squarely caused by drugs".

> that alone shows sugar to be far safer

Sugar is safer than cocaine, but that does not make it safe. I shouldn't have said the only difference - sorry.

> But never mind, let's look at, oh, the lethal dose (LD50) info

This is too narrowly focused - the LD50 only refers to the immediate effects of a substance, not the long lasting effects. I'd argue that long lasting effects are more dangerous as they're less apparent.

> Plus there is copious sugar in your bloodstream without which you'd be in hypoglycemic shock leading to death.

Yes, our bodies need sugar and create it from the food we eat. I was talking about the food we call sugar ("Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food.)

I should use "added sugar" or "refined sugar".

What if they're being intentionally coerced by pharma?

[0]: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/rela...

Even if that correlation shows causation, that's a big jump to: > What if they're being intentionally coerced by pharma?

Now I'm wishing I could have that conversation one more time...

You know what happens if you raise your tenant's rent because you learned they have more money now? They move, and now you're losing money as you are trying to find a new tenant.

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.

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 the competition, that is, who had to work. UBI wouldn't have given her that advantage.

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.