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I'd rather see that trust money kept out of (re-)election campaign devices.
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Having known one of them briefly, I can say he doesn't reflect any of the snobbery one may expect. In fact, quite the opposite.
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Lux.. I assumed there would be the usual cavalcade of 'the 1%' screams of agony here.
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Man, are you tone-deaf to the concept of the 1%, or what.
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Living in Maui for almost 28 years I met a few Trustafarians. Most of them handled it well.
As for the tactics used to preserve family wealth it is a slippery road full of pitfalls, dishonesty
and honesty me thinks *(:>*
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It's totally understandable that a person would want to take care of their offspring by providing them with a trust if the person has the resources to do so. One issue that arises, though, is that there is a tendency on the part of some people to assume that if someone is wealthy, and the wealth did not come from criminal activity, then the person has the wealth through merit. But is inherited wealth merited wealth? I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It is possible that the person who originally acquired the wealth may have been merited in getting that wealth because they got it through their own enterprise. Since the original wealth was merited, I suppose one could say that, in a way, the merit transfers with the wealth. But I don't think that is usually how we think of merit. Usually we think someone merits having something because of their own enterprise.
To the extent that inherited wealth also gives a competitive advantage to those who inherit wealth over those who get very little to no monetary support from their parents, that also affects assessments of merit. That sort of consideration can be applied even if there is no trust fund, but it is more pronounced if there is a trust fund.
The most troubling aspect of this for me, though, is the move by a Republican politicians in general to push for getting rid of estate (inheritance) tax, corporate taxes and capital gains taxes altogether. What that would do for the very wealthy - like the Romney children - is that they could live off of their trust fund money without paying any federal taxes at all. That's just flat out wrong.
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the wealth may allow people to be MORE productive of members of society than they would have been otherwise. Think bill gates trying to wipe out polio.
and then there's Paris Hilton.
