"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..

[Anonymous]

...It’s time to try baby bonds."


I had never heard of this before and thought it was a pretty interesting idea. Looking back through a google search, it looks like this has been brought up several times since the government bailouts in 2008. It seems like an effective way to even out the playing field. I know that this is geared toward race equality, but it would really be race neutral. I work a lot with poor teenagers in Appalachia, and one thing that gets to me is that they are kind of hopeless from the beginning. Yes. A lot of kids would blow it. And a lot of parents would steal it. But for a number of kids, having some seed money and knowing that it is there would allow and encourage them to expand their dreams. And that is what America is built on, right? A solid base of millions of dreamers working together.

From "The Atlantic:"

"Baby bonds are simple. The government would create investment accounts for infants, giving babies born to poor families large seed grants and babies born to rich families small ones. The money would grow, and kids would gain access to it when they reached adulthood, to use for school, a down payment, or a start-up.

…

Naomi Zewde of the City University of New York studied a hypothetical baby-bond program that would provide rich babies $200 in assets and poor babies $50,000 in assets, with infants born to middle-class families getting scaled amounts in between. As of 2015, the median white young adult had a net worth of $46,000, versus $2,900 for the median black young adult. Had they been granted baby bonds at birth, white young adults would be worth $79,159 and black young adults $57,845, Zewde found. White kids would be roughly 40 percent wealthier than black kids, not 16 times as wealthy."

[Anonymous]

You really think people are going to use this responsibly?

[Anonymous]

This is SO stupid.

[Anonymous]

We offer financial aid for college. That is a lot better than just throwing 50k at every poor kid born without regard for what dumb things they're going to do with it.

[Anonymous]

Here is a link to the article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/close-racial-wealth-gap-baby-bonds/613525/

[Anonymous]

So we incentivize people not to work hard and rather just to be lazy and crap out more kids they can't afford. Great.

[Anonymous]

Republican Senator Kasich and the Clinton administration were actually looking (separately) into something like this, back in the halcyon days of 2001 when we had a budget surplus and nobody knew what to do with it. The proposal was to give every kid under a certain income $1,000, because that's what was affordable. Not sure what counts as "rich" or "poor." Compounding $1,000 for 18 years would result in a larger amount, but not $50,000. Frankly, retooling the Pell Grant and other grant programs would probably make a bigger difference for poor kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Republican Senator Kasich and the Clinton administration were actually looking (separately) into something like this, back in the halcyon days of 2001 when we had a budget surplus and nobody knew what to do with it. The proposal was to give every kid under a certain income $1,000, because that's what was affordable. Not sure what counts as "rich" or "poor." Compounding $1,000 for 18 years would result in a larger amount, but not $50,000. Frankly, retooling the Pell Grant and other grant programs would probably make a bigger difference for poor kids.

I agree. Expanding Pell Grants and the GI Bill would be much more effective in creating economic mobility for kids born into poverty than baby bonds ever will.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We offer financial aid for college. That is a lot better than just throwing 50k at every poor kid born without regard for what dumb things they're going to do with it.

+1. College is already free for those in poverty. You're expecting poor families who have made bad decisions for generations to suddenly start making good decisions when $50,000 falls in their lap? Have you ever heard of moral hazard? There would just be a bunch of entry level cadillacs appearing outside of peoples' houses when their kids turned 18.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We offer financial aid for college. That is a lot better than just throwing 50k at every poor kid born without regard for what dumb things they're going to do with it.

+1. College is already free for those in poverty. You're expecting poor families who have made bad decisions for generations to suddenly start making good decisions when $50,000 falls in their lap? Have you ever heard of moral hazard? There would just be a bunch of entry level cadillacs appearing outside of peoples' houses when their kids turned 18.

I suspect it will also worsen a lot of people's drug problems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So we incentivize people not to work hard and rather just to be lazy and crap out more kids they can't afford. Great.

Time and time again the research has shown that the best way to lift people out of poverty is...to give them money! There is no actual evidence to support the idea thag doing this incentives laziness and other vices. It's actually been shown that it helps tremendously. I would really suggest looking at the facts on this instead of parroting this knee-jerk reaction perpetuatinf this harmful myth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Republican Senator Kasich and the Clinton administration were actually looking (separately) into something like this, back in the halcyon days of 2001 when we had a budget surplus and nobody knew what to do with it. The proposal was to give every kid under a certain income $1,000, because that's what was affordable. Not sure what counts as "rich" or "poor." Compounding $1,000 for 18 years would result in a larger amount, but not $50,000. Frankly, retooling the Pell Grant and other grant programs would probably make a bigger difference for poor kids.

Enough with investing in "programs." Do you realize that we spend more money building staffing and maintaining these programs than it would actually cost to just give people the damn money?

[Anonymous]

I'd vote for whoever would NOT support this ridiculousness.

[Anonymous]

Why not have like another social security? It starts when you're born and you can start receiving payments when you are 18.

[Anonymous]

Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?