Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

Re:Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not by sokoloff on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:50PM (#21036389)

The minute you give a bunch of people $1-3MM as upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034871), you're sending $30-90BB "up", by definition, from the perspective of the typical American (median household wealth of $97,300). It's perhaps just not as far up, so not as far that it needs to trickle down, but it seems more or less the same on a zoomed out level and puts the recipients at 10-30x the median wealth. Simply investing that sum in index equity funds would typically provide a income to place a household around the median household income over a four decade period without working.

Maybe trickle down actually works. Maybe we all got a return on it in invisible ways. Maybe things would be a lot worse for the median taxpayer than they are after the policy was enacted. How would we know for sure?

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Re:Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not by jlokier on Saturday September 21, 2019 @05:18PM (#21037978)

I think the proposed idea is not supposed to allow people to simply invest the money and live off the proceeds.

Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.

With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.

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