Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "wealthy"

by Chris Hughes, Co-founder of Facebook.,St. Martin’s Press,NY, 2018.

Chris Hughes gives us a critical, thoughtful view of his remarkable luck in rooming with Mark Zuckenberg at Harvard. Riding the huge fortune they generated with Facebook took hold of their, and all, our lives. He calls it luck, not a path accessible to most of us, since the U.S. has been skewed to favor the wealthy in the last few decades.

Therefore,, the 1% of people who hold most of the U.S. wealth should provide a guaranteed income in order to combat poverty and stabilize the middle class. The Earned Income Tax Credit is already in place and could easily be re-structured to relieve what has become a vastly unfair loss of workable economic s for so many.

The financial Times (July 2019) has argued against a Universal basic Income (UBI), assuming that it would undermine incentives to work and social cohesion and increase inequality and poverty. Studies have not confirmed this. Money for the UBI need not come out of health and education funds.

Many studies, including one by the Roosevelt Institute, have shown that a small additional amount can lift the spirit and heal the stress of those unable to pay their living expenses. Those who appose the UBI have been shown wrong in claiming that much of that money goes to drugs and alcohol. Alaska’s universal sharing of oil resources is a case in point.

A rise in income tax for the wealthy to pay for a UBI is long overdue, since we all support the Facebooks of the world. Access to opportunity has been the key to broader studies that show the universal benefits of having enough to eat. Do read this book.