Essential financial life skills for 21st-century Americans
Having these financial life skills can help you navigate challenging economic environments.
- Americans are swimming in increasingly higher amounts of debt, even the upper middle class.
- For many, this burden can be alleviated by becoming familiar with some straightforward financial concepts.
- Here's some essential financial life skills needed to ensure your economic wellbeing.
Universal basic income: The plan to give $12,000 to every American adult
Tax megacorps like Amazon to fund universal basic income, says 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
- The Freedom Dividend is a universal basic income proposal initiated by 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
- Yang's plan would give $1,000 a month, or $12,000 per year, to every American over the age of 18, every year. This would get every U.S. adult just below the poverty line which is currently $12,770 a year.
- How would it be funded? Yang suggests a value added tax on megacorps like Amazon (which paid zero tax last year). Funnel that money back into the American's people's hands to boost the economy, improve mental health, increase education and lower violence.
The colossal problem with universal basic income
Here's why universal basic income will hurt the 99%, and make the 1% even richer.
- Universal basic income is a band-aid solution that will not solve wealth inequality, says Rushkoff.
- Funneling money to the 99% perpetuates their roles as consumers, pumping money straight back up to the 1% at the top of the pyramid.
- Rushkoff suggests universal basic assets instead, so that the people at the bottom of the pyramid can own some means of production and participate in the profits of mega-rich companies.
U.K. Royal Mint honors Stephen Hawking on new 50p coin
The coin depicts a black hole and one of the late physicist's most important formulas.
- Stephen Hawking, cosmologist, theoretical physicist and popular science educator, died on March 14, 2018.
- The Royal Mint is celebrating his work and life with a collector's coin that's selling for 10 pounds.
- Hawking's younger son said he imagined his dad reacting to the news with "one of his huge, wide smiles."
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you
Most people don't just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.
'We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …' Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013
'We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers.' Donald Trump, inaugural address, 2017
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