Even in today's money, I wouldn't call it a "head start"

I read a book nearly a decade ago, that I think is worth highlighting.

> The book's central thesis is that members of the global elite are using philanthropic institutions to preserve a system that concentrates wealth and power at the top at the expense of societal progress. Giridharadas examines the narrow limits of modern philanthropy, claiming that rich donors avoid contributing to causes which could undermine their own lofty status. He argues that in some cases, the political lobbying efforts of wealthy donors may reduce the government's ability to address inequality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

My first intuition was that he was just throwing money away. Imagine getting $250 at some arbitrarily young age! But it looks like it's going into something like a 529 plan. That'll be great for these kids come 18 years from now.

But an even more important idea here is going from zero to one investment accounts. That will have a profound impact on the financial literacy and lifelong savings behavior of many of these kids.

This move isn't going to win him any steak dinners or awards bestowed by people running power organizations. Instead, his charity is diffused across millions of children who will be too young to ever vote him into any office. Many of them won't ever even know who he was.

(It's clearly hard to hate giving money to kids; that seems good. What seems bad is relying on the largesse of the extremely wealthy.)

They're making it seem like this is some big selfless thing, giving a bunch of kids a small amount of cash. I see it as a big payday for the large banks.

I think this essentially explains why taxing billionaires is not very useful, because the total amount of their life generated wealth assets amounts to a small amount for 25 million people let alone larger populations.

Even if you took all the $’s away, the government really needs to tax high numbers of lower income people for the income to be meaningful.

Oh, I said, right, we should set one of those up for her.

Once she had one, it was clear I should be adding to it every month. But, the initial nudge to get her one was important. Hopefully, having an account will make it more likely to put a little in every month? It's not everything, but it's also not nothing.

Of course, cheaper housing would help the kids more, but that has more entrenched interests opposed to it (almost every homeowner), and not even Dell has enough to overcome that.

See his total net worth and the YTD increase: https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/michael-s-de.... Google/ChatGPT his 2019 (pre-covid) net worth (I'll save you the trouble): $27B. It doesn't matter if it's super accurate because we all know the multiple is probably pretty accurate given what's transpired.

And before you go calling me a wealth hater, I just wish the US wasn't such a wealth lover. Just a bit less emphasis on people getting rich and a bit more emphasis on getting our shit together so that the government can fund savings accounts for kids and while they're at it teach them some basic understanding of investment/budgeting.

Having $250 in an account does practically nothing for the child. But having $6.25B invested does generate fees for bankers chosen to manage this program. (Chosen by the president's Wall Street entourage, presumably?)