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...
I know several people that vote for and donate to campaigns for senators on the other side of the aisle just to help ensure gridlock
the next layer after that is that tax education is so poor that the population doesnt even know what laws they want to change
so its not worth talking about as that ensures another 100 years of “tax the rich” turning into “tax the income of wage workers making over $500k” by the time a bill makes it out of committee
(I don’t find that controversial, just different enough to be interesting)
It's like how prices at different gas stations tend to be within a few percent of each other. It's not conspiracy, just competition.
Had a conversation with a us friend who works with philanthropy. That person agreed that philanthropy is ugly, but let me know that it is better than nothing while the US has its current ways.
Personally, I would have loved to have some money on such an investment account as a kid, and I would nerd out on its development, discuss it with friends etc. Knowing that everyone around me has the same account would also make it less taboo to discuss money in general.
Only way to prevent people from deciding who gets their dollars is to abolish private property and let the state make all those decisions.
" - $73.34 billion in tax revenue was lost to the public in 2022 due to personal and corporate charitable deductions. - If we include just the little data we have about charitable bequests and the investments of charities themselves, the revenue loss is pushed up to roughly $111 billion. - And if we also include the capital gains revenue lost from the donation of appreciated assets, the true revenue costs of charity likely add up to several hundreds of billions of dollars each year."
There is a political benefit for Trump and fellow Republicans. The accounts will become available in the midst of a midterm election, providing money to millions of voters — and a campaign talking point to GOP candidates — at a critical time politically. The $1,000 deposits are slated to end just after the 2028 presidential election.
Exactly how much money is needed to create this society you're imagining? America has more than enough money (IMHO), we just suffer from cost issues, and if you just throw more money at a situation where you have cost issues, you are just burning the money.
Seizing all of it and putting it into even a foreign owned asset basket (could pick an economy as shielded as possible from US in case it causes instability in US economy) should yield enough interest (at least 5% real) to operate the federal government and public entitlements indefinitely based on present real revenues.
The anti-rich sentient has somehow reached such a fever pitch that when a billionaire donates $6B to children the top post on HN is bitching about it.
It is good, though. I think most folks who complain about it, though, wish it were better (better does not mean Dell spends even more of his own money on this, not directly anyway).
It's a good thing that he's giving away 4% of his wealth. He'll still have $140,000,000,000 left after this donation though, which is relevant context.
define "more effective"
I want evidence supporting that claim, that government taxes are better for giving "children a head start" compare to philanthropy.
The taxes don't have to come from income, there were plenty of tax cut extensions + some new ones that could have been let go without increasing the individual upper-middle-to-lower wealth class taxes and greatly cut down budget deficit with the increased revenue. Instead the extensions of the 2017 cuts are going add some 3.7 trillion over the next 10 years.
State and city institutions get loans just like we do, sometimes at lower interest rates than individuals can. During covid, loan rate was lower than inflation. That is essentially free money.
It's a complex subject. We've been all told that US debt is a massive timebomb that will explode, however many other countries have higher debt:gdp ratio.
I'm not saying one shouldn't pay their taxes. I'm saying don't pay more tax than you need to. US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate.
I've been thinking about a synthesis of communism and capitalism, where instead of levying dollar taxes, the corporations transfer 0.5% of control (stock, etc) to the government per year. Adjusted for how much the government already controls.
See also perhaps criticism(s) against meritocracy:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#The_Meritocracy_Tr...
And as a bonus, it makes everyone defacto invested into the status quo of "line go up at all costs, devoid of relation to economy." Don't think about protest little ones, or you'll lose your nest egg and mommy and daddy lose their retirement.
I'm sure they're also salivating thinking about how to use this to justify the removal of Social Security payment in due time too.
This isn't badass, it's a disgrace. They've hoarded an incredible amount of wealth generated by others and returned a sliver of it. You've been so conditioned to accept this system that you're even grateful for the scraps.
If they gave $100 billion, they'd still have over $51 billion in the bank. That's roughly $7 million a day for every day he's been alive, or enough to feed every child in America for over a decade. Imagine the regional economic stimulus if instead of being hoarded for nearly half a century that money was paid out in salaries to those actually earning that money. _And_ they'd still have billions.
America had a tax rate of 91% on the obscenely wealthy for decades and around 70% until the 80s. Reducing this to historical lows has universally, by both bipartisan and nonpartisan[2] parties, been found to have been the primary driver of inequality[1].
At even an absurd 99% tax rate, applied equally instead of tiered, Michael Dell would have $1.5 billion dollars.
[1]: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/t... [2]: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R42729.pdf
It's like celebrating someone having a 'successful' Kickstarter campaign so they or their child can have surgery or some treatment.
Or society could decide that people shouldn't have to pay for surgery and healthcare should be provided to all without them having to cut a cheque.
Society has already basically decided that: it's called health insurance. Having a "single" "government" payer where claimants actually pay nothing at PoS can be thought of like a very low deductible health insurance plan, can it not? Everyone still pays their premium in taxes, unless we mean to enslave doctors and nurses.
What if I had put 10k into my kids account when they were born - and maybe add in a little over time
But then I realize I was better off just investing that money myself - and if there’s anything left over it goes to them
(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.
Getting $250 once doesn't seem like it will have a huge benefit to someone's life.
Note too that higher education in the US is partially supported by things other than tuition and so 250 can go farther than it seems because it is 250 applied to your portion of the whole... We can debate how much different payers should pay, but that is a different question.
I feel he would have been better off going to someone like Coursera and funding minimum accredited US associates degrees and delivered electronically and delivered for free to anyone in the United States.
It seems like the buying power of $6 billion to deliver electronic services on the cheap would make more sense than giving millions of children a one time amount of essentially pocket change in relation to total spending.
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.
I hear this often, but as a homeowner, I don't understand it. Assessed value tracks market value, and the last thing I want is property taxes rising.
The only homeowners who would prefer rising prices are those looking to sell or over-leveraged landlords.
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.
Dell’s contribution is explicitly piggybacking on the new federal accounts.
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?)
People realize this is precursor to them removing social security for this generation of kids?
But you just got $6 billion and you already want more? This attitude exactly why so many people are against raising taxes, supposedly against their own self-interest. The idea that I can freely spend OTHER people's money is the most seductive thing in the world.
Just checked my accounts, I didn't get $6B. Maybe the wire just hasn't come through, I'll check back tomorrow.
Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.
Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”
$6B is what, 4% of his current net worth? For a family with a million dollar net worth that's about $40k to put it in more normal human perspectives.
I think there's plenty of more socially bad ways for him to toss his wealth around. I applaud him for doing a bit. But I also don't exactly see it as some extreme amount of charity, because at his level it really isn't that extreme.
Nothing would help the next generation more, even above giving them seed investment money, than helping them avoid the pitfalls which are just waiting for them around every corner.
My daughter took an elective for this in HS, and every day would come home and say how much she was learning and how empowered she felt about money afterwards.
Most of us are completely clueless in high school and the lessons will be completely forgotten. (Though I'm happy my province, Ontario, started doing this a few years ago.)
I agree that most of us get out of high school clueless, both because of age/maturity but also because schools are not teaching people HOW to think, they're teaching WHAT to think.
Two areas of knowledge would revolutionize the system, and obviously would never happen:
* critical reasoning -- this is I bought my kids a book on cognitive biases and how to think through problems and fallacies in thinking
* curiosity -- this is where AI would help in schools, but unfortunately teachers are pushing kids away from using AI in general, let alone using it as a tool to be curious and explore knowledge and reasoning about a subject
I can only conclude that these things are not inherently in the public school system on purpose to keep the population dumb and docile. I hate thinking that, but it's the only conclusion I can come to. Someone(s) wants our children to be dumb, dependent and easily manipulated in their thinking.
*
In the U.S., we had this for about 50 years, but was mostly gone by the mid-1980's. It was part of a class called Home Economics.
In some schools it was mandatory for everyone. In other schools, it was for girls only because at the time it started, it was usual for women to do the household finances.
The course often also included things like cooking, cleaning, and sewing. What people today learn from online "life hacks."
I'm glad I learned all of those skills in high school. I only rarely need to darn my socks, but the knots I learned translate to fishing and other needs.
It was also where I learned typing.
* proper nutritional eating
* balancing a budget (saving, spending)
* simple skills like how to stitch and sew their clothes when there is a hole or button needs to be fixed
I looked at their text books and my jaw hit the floor. All up to date, amazing pictures and instructions, little anime characters teaching life skills in a fun way. I was blown away, it was both practical and fun.
My daughter got a class like this in her charter school, they learned how to change a tire for a car and such. She absolutely loved it. They ran scenarios like, "if you made $<x> amount of money per year, and you want to live around $<y> how could you do it?", and she learned how she would get a roommate, how to split rent effectively and make a monthly budget.
Because what would you teach in these classes? I guess you'd start with, avoid debt, spend according to your means etc.
Next minute some politician will be concerned voters take it too seriously and start judging them by their ability to stick to budgets. Nononono. Let's make that curriculum less revolutionary.
Then I suppose there's corporate interest too. Surely spending withing your means is un-American? Let's include in the lessons stuff about spreading the cost of your purchase over 3 years on a credit card. And did you know Visa, our educational partner, offers you a student credit card with just 280% annual interest and 0.001% cashback, just to get you to dip your toes in the world of crippling debt? I mean, sustainable personal finance. And if that all gets too much, here's some opioid painkillers. There, much better.
I suspect ignorance is desired. Financially illiterate people are more profitable.
Spot on, my friend. This is the only conclusion I've come to after watching my kids go through the school system.
The key lesson kids need to learn is to avoid debt and live within their means. Now-a-days every business has decided there is more revenue in pushing their individual debt platforms rather than their products. Go into the Gap, and the staff is heavily incentivized on pushing "Gap Cards", but not on actual product sales.
I won't get into a religious debate on if all debt is bad, but it is a fact that without financial awareness this is the #1 problem facing households today, spending above their means and having "bad" debt dragging down their wealth building.
At an early age I pointed out to my kids, as we went through a store cashier, the signs about "get a <x> card for savings" and brainwashed them that those are traps. They are now in college, everything is cash flowed, and they will not have a credit card in their name (in fact their credit is locked).
"But how will they be able to afford a house and get a loan if they don't have a credit score?!" -- by saving and investing their money instead of spending it with pieces of plastic. Loans can be given with manual underwriting. Cars can be bought with cash following simple rules.
Aside from all that though, just teaching AWARENESS and intentionality from a personal finance class will carry on beyond the class. Having awareness of spending (i.e. "Can I afford this?"), followed by intentionality ("I'll save $500 for the next three months and then buy it, instead of paying payments. I can wait!"), followed by planning (i.e. budgeting), and you have someone who is going to be successful and build wealth.
As for the Dells— they really do seem to care about our children and their philanthropy is beautiful.
~ https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-retirement-program-aus...
and other news soures
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
a savings system for workplace pensions in retirement. It involves money earned by an employee being placed into an investment fund to be made legally available to members upon retirement. Employers make compulsory payments to these funds at a proportion of their employee's wages.
Currently, the mandatory minimum "guarantee" contribution is set at 12%, having increased from 11.5% on 1 July 2025
As of 30 June 2025, Australians have AU$4.33 trillion invested as superannuation assets, making Australia as a nation the 4th largest holder of pension fund assets in the world.
See Also the Singapore Fund: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund
Essentially the same amount as Germany give or take currency. That has long been in place though the amounts have changed over time.
Not every family gets this credit. It phases out at sufficiently high income.
the german system simply pays out the money unconditionally. regardless of income. it doesn't affect your taxes, but if the regular taxes happen to lower then you get more money than you pay.
> A portion of the Child Tax Credit is refundable for 2024. This portion is called the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC). For 2024, up to $1,700 per child may be refundable.
say i am earning 2000$ per month. i pay $100 on taxes on that. so that's $24000 income and $1200 in taxes per year.
$1700 as a tax credit, does that mean my taxes are 0? or do i get $500 on top of my income?
so after taxes how much do i have? 24000? 24500? and where are the $250 per month you mentioned?
here is how it works in germany:
24000 euro is my income. 1200 euro are my taxes. but i get 3000 euro unconditional per child. so after taxes my total income is 25800 euro with one child. add 3000 for each additional child.
the actual tax rate is made up, and just set to 5% to make the comparison easier.
yandie•2mo ago
Even in today's money, I wouldn't call it a "head start"
piker•2mo ago
codeddesign•2mo ago
piker•2mo ago
dmoy•2mo ago
It's also tax-free growth (not that the average <18 y/o would incur any tax on $250-$1250 of principle)
qntmfred•2mo ago
> beginning next year, the U.S. Treasury will contribute $1,000 to the Invest America account of every baby born on or after January 1, 2025
hopefully more people/organizations will decide to contribute as well.
LastTrain•2mo ago
aksss•2mo ago
throwforfeds•2mo ago
stetrain•2mo ago
newsclues•2mo ago
But what if 10 or twenty of them want to start a company? Maybe they have some savings or can get parents to chip in or a grant, but they can’t open a store and work it, or start a landscaping business or a software company.
xqcgrek2•2mo ago
najarvg•2mo ago
magicalist•2mo ago
This is largely separate from your point, which is good, but the $250 is for kids that won't get the $1000. The $1000 only goes to kids born between 2025 and 2028.
Balgair•2mo ago
The stock market is at ~9.5% returns historically, inflation is likely at ~3% historically, so assume a little higher at 6.5% and that $1000 with a dollar a day increase is then ~$14,800, inflation adjusted.
If you go up to ~$100/mo at 6.5%, then you get ~$42,000, which is an honest start to a small business or college tuition.
The little extra per month really adds up here!
I may not like the administration for a lot of things, but this is one thing that I can really get behind.
Retric•2mo ago
Obviously many people are happy to spend whatever, but with 25 million people you’ll see a wide range of personalities and life situations. Imagine an otherwise identical life without 600 dollars of credit card debt, that’s a worth quite a bit over time and will likely apply to some of these individuals. Perhaps a musical instrument or similar purchase will end up really helping someone kid, you never really know.
Balgair•2mo ago
If you put in $30.00 / mo , a dollar a day, then it goes all the way up to $10,700 , a 18x increase (42x over the $250)
Look, we can play with numbers all day long here.
The fundamental difference is the additional contribution amount. Finding just a little bit here and there makes a huge difference.
And getting people into the habit of putting a set amount away each month is the key. Priming this habit, getting folks to look past the next 2 weeks, to just consider the adult they are raising, I think that will be hugely affective.
I may not like what the current administration is doing in a lot of things. But for this little one thing, I can at least applaud this little one thing. I think it will really help out a lot of people in more than just the pure cash.
RickJWagner•2mo ago
People will have a visible example of the power of compounding. It’s just a shame there isn’t more time in the equation so they could see the real magic happen.
Did you know that at typical market rates, someone saving $1000 at age 20 would have $64,000 at age 62?
Even more illustrative, if the same person waited until age 27 to save the same $1000, they would only get 32k. If they started at 34, they’d only get $16k!
The importance of time as the secret ingredient is the best kept secret ( that’s endlessly explained by people like Warren Buffett ). Hopefully these accounts will help the message stick.