I have no idea who Sydney Sweeney is. She is apparently a hot new Hollywood star who has been working hard, appearing in a bunch of movies I haven’t seen, and good for her — but I think all celebrities get more attention and money than they actually deserve.
In an informative twist, though, I learned from this article that there are tiers of celebrity, and that Sweeney is near the bottom because she isn’t a nepo baby. Despite having a $3 million house and being pursued by paparazzi, she’s on a treadmill where she must work non-stop (at being fabulous and fashionable, which is of course much nicer than having to grind non-stop at factory) or her whole world will come crashing down.
The whole of American society, at this moment, is a layer of various anxieties and resentments without any sincerely shared values pinning it all in place. Some of those resentments are more deserved than others; the millennial generation stands to inherit a whopping $68 trillion from the Boomer generation. What is being coined The Great Wealth Transfer is already beginning. Sweeney’s peers, who are mostly the children of very rich people, are going to become even richer by doing nothing. Millions of millennials are going to become very rich by doing nothing. Among the many benefits of this will be that they can post only when they want to. They will be able to take jobs they care about instead of ones they need.
But Sweeney isn’t one of those people. She comes from a family that could not afford to financially support her at all when she finished school. She will not have the luxury of relaxing as her inheritance pours in. Everyone deserves to be able to take six months off to have a baby. Everyone. The fact that Sydney Sweeney cannot is a reminder that the reason American workers do not have paid family leave is also the reason each generation has more nepotism babies than the last. We do not tax rich people enough and they do not pay their fair share; the fact of that, over decades, has intruded upon and warped every aspect of American life. Sweeney has to work, like everyone else, and has to do so for whatever she can get, and she has to do it knowing that what reaches her was the absolute minimum figure that people who are paid much more than her had determined that she would be willing to take. She’s not alone.
I wouldn’t feel sorry for Sweeney, but she does demonstrate that wealth inequality permeates every level of American society, and that always the ones on top are the people loaded with inherited wealth that they never had to work for. Tax the rich! Tax them a lot!
Here’s a thought: what if we enacted a graduated income tax? I mean a real one, the sort we had before the Reagan administration.
I’m going to call nonsense on some of this.
Specifically that all the Boomers are rich and are going to die and make their kids rich.
OK. I’m a Boomer.
I know a lot of Boomers, my peer group.
Most of them don’t have a whole lot of retirement savings.
It’s almost a bimodal distribution, some have enough, a lot more of them have about zero. Zero. None.
They live off of pensions (often not very large these days) and mostly Social Security.
One guy just died recently. He was still solvent thanks to a Reverse Mortgage on his house and deferred property taxes.
This is of course, anecdata, and not all that definitive.
The real data says that 10% or so of retired Boomers have even a million dollars. Meaning 90% don’t.
So what is going to happen to that $68 trillion in retirement assets? A lot of it will be spent on living expenses, end of life health care, nursing homes, taxes, and frittered away in various scams like cryptocurrencies.
Yeah, maybe 5-10% of the Millennials will get enough inherited wealth to cruise through life as an endless series of parties.
The rest will be like most of us, working for a living, and running hard to stay in one place.
PS As an added bonus, how many of those Millennials are going to keep their inherited wealth for long? Some will, some will just blow it in various creative ways.
We’ve all seen that.
A guy I knew a long time ago, got close to a million USD in today’s money from his parent’s estate.
What followed was vacations in Mexico, paying all his debts including years of back child support, big motorcycles, long road trips.
Five years later, he was living in a tent in the park and getting by with food stamps.
No, she’s not alone in that. That applies to literally everyone who doesn’t have the luxury of setting their own salary, like that $56 billion Musk tried to compensate himself for being CEO of Tesla.
While I do not feel sorry for Sweeney, I do empathize with her situation.
I grew up in a housing project in the inner city in the early sixties. The projects were surrounded by middle class housing. Most families owned their homes of one and two-family dwellings. I loved baseball and at 10 or 11 I tried out for the little league. Was picked by a team and I played as well or better than most of the other kids. I also knew more about the game then all of them. I was never put in any games, so I sat patiently waiting. One day while speaking to the manager I remember a comment he made to me, “Oh you’re from the projects” and he walked away. Didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I knew there was something very wrong with his comment. I quit the team shortly thereafter disappointing my father. Later I began to realize the manager’s son and five of his friends got most of the playing time and eventually figured out what he meant by “Oh, you’re from the projects.”
PS: I agree with RAVEN about boomers’ wealth. I’m a boomer, able to survive on my SS and pension (for now), but I am not going to be leaving much money to my family when I die.
No, Grimes Didn’t Make Fun of Elon Musk for Saying Rich Ex-Wives Have Destroyed Civilization
I’m going to second raven @ #2. It’s not “boomers”. That’s a deflection. According to Forbes there are 2,540 billionaires in the world. If you double that to the 5,000 richest people you’re getting people with hundreds of millions of dollars. They have more wealth than everyone else combined, including all the boomers. There’s the problem.
The US, and EU, used to do this.
But then, little privileges compounded, allowed rich people to buy a larger megaphone and convince everybody else that that taxes should be lowered and checks and balances eroded…
Power is a positive feedback.
By any means, tax the shit out of the rich.
And then, to make it last, build a culture that sees any concentration of power as a threat to freedom.
“…and that always the ones on top are the people loaded with inherited wealth that they never had to work for.”
ALWAYS? This is demonstrably false. I personally know several very wealthy individuals who came from working-class families. Or, look at the vast majority of superstar professional athletes. But yeah, it’s easy to automatically criticize the wealthy when you are not one of them. Being wealthy per se is not a bad thing.
Why would they be using Sweeney as the poster child for their comments?
Can you ignore your family’s politics? Jennifer Lawrence and Sydney Sweeney disagree
Not for nothing, she’s also attractive and white.
For all but 1 person in the world, there’s always somebody wealthier to be jealous of. It requires compassion to stop complaining about what one doesn’t have, look in the other direction, and show generosity to those with less.
@John Harshman
“Here’s a thought: what if we enacted a graduated income tax? I mean a real one, the sort we had before the Reagan administration.”
We don’t need a graduated tax. The current tax structure is just fine*. You just have to wait a little while longer for the wealth to trickle down…
*sarcasm.
@raven
I’m a Millennial, pushing 40, and I’ve already started to see the generational wealth transfer. My dad committed suicide. I and my sisters got his life insurance policies. It wasn’t a million, but it was enough. We all pay mortgages on our houses and have no student loans. We are outliers on our friends because of it. Because I live in a Midwest city, it was enough for me to finish off my 18 years of paying loans and put a down payment on a small 1948 house in a not terribly fashionable neighborhood. Woo, living the high life!
And it doesn’t matter, really. Yeah, we got generational wealth and we’re very grateful for it because we know not everyone will get it it. Most of that wealth came from things like work sponsored life-insurance, which isn’t a thing anymore. But we’ve already paid so much in student loan interest. We’ve wrecked our health being unable to afford health insurance and even when we did have health insurance not being able to afford the co-pays and now the conditions are chronic.
Spouse and I looked up, for S&G, what his parents first house cost back in 1985. New build, suburb. It was 60,000. Cute little ranch-style house, what used to be called a “starter house”. Now that house is 400,000, and honestly one of the cheaper ones in the area. Even if the Millennials inherit, and a lot of us will not, it’ll be too late.
I always forget what an inhumane dystopia the US is. Everyone deserves to be able to take two to three years off to have a baby, surely (plus the mid/end of the pregnancy depending on your health)? Who are you handing a six month old off to???
#1 graduated tex is a must but not sufficient. Along with it I would recommend having 1% of the market value of owned assets treated as income.
Then the fabulously wealthy rentiers will be up in stratosphere tax payments.
Of course a lot of nonsense deductions would also have to be axed.
Isn’t the fundamental criticism of socialism that you are getting money you haven’t earned? Isn’t inheriting it kinda like that?
Couldn’t she buy a cheaper house?
This article doesn’t seem to be about “nepo babies” but rather about silver spoon babies at best. Unless the definition has expanded for some reason, a nepo baby is someone whose parents were successful in the career they’ve chosen, so they presumably get breaks others don’t due to those nepotistic connections. Jamie Lee Curtis, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Michael Douglas would be nepo babies (except I guess no one had coined the term yet). Jaden Smith would be the poster nepo baby.
Technically, what Genocide Ron Reagan (Guatemala, Somalia) supported was Tinkle Down Economics, in which very wealthy sociopaths are given massive tax cuts on the assumption that they will urinate their growing wealth – mostly stolen from workers who deserve a fair days pay for a fair days work, but get scraps off the table – onto workers and a lucky few will actually be able to afford a home and food for their families. Maybe even medical care that won’t bankrupt them.
Well it’s not as if that $68 trillion is evenly distributed, is it?
The handful of wealthy Boomers will be able to leave a substantial amount of wealth to their already-privileged and advantaged children, largely tax free, if they have the wit to actually do estate planning. Living trusts, IRA transfers, real estate, investments–even the assets that are taxed are taxed at a far lower rate than W-2 wages or worse, the gig economy’s K-1 or 1099-NEC.
If you have investment income or capital gains income, that is taxed at 0%, 15% or a max of 20%.
If you actually work for a living (generally a W-2 for wages), that same amount is taxed at a minimum of 10% and a maximum of 37%.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brackets
So if you work for a living, you basically pay nearly twice the taxes as someone who lives off of investments, ie., other people’s work.
The cherry on top of the investor classes’ extremely favorable tax status is that if they have a bad year of living off of other people’s labor, they get to file something called a carryback, in which you get to file an amended return showing your loss of income and then the federal government reworks all of your prior tax returns to adjust all of the previous income WITH the loss year, so the federal government writes you a large refund check to make you feel better.
If you work for a living, you are SOL. The federal government isn’t giving you a dime. Go get a job, you lazy freeloader! (Whether or not you actually can.)
It’s also a misnomer to categorize all retirees as having millions in assets. Again, not all retirees have the same amount of retirement income and not all of their assets are liquid. For many retirees, their biggest asset is their home, so for most of them, the only way to get the value of the house while living in it is a reverse mortgage, which is generally predatory and seldom delivers the actual value of the house to the recipient of the reverse mortgage. Also, at what age did these retirees actually retire? At 55? 65? 72? Having a million dollars in retirement means something different at 55 than it does at 75. For the people who were forced into early retirement due to health issues, loss of a job and an inability to get comparable new job (or any job; ageism is a thing), making that retirement income last for the remainder of your life means that you probably aren’t going to be living the easy life with luxury retirement vacations and you certainly aren’t going to be leaving a whole lot of assets to your next of kin.
Sydney Sweeney isn’t exactly wrong when she states that she is always working and can’t take time off to have a baby.
She is currently one of the more employable actresses in Hollywood. If she takes any time away from the rat race, her marketability and consequently employability drops like a stone.
As an actress, she has a fairly limited window in which to make her fortune. She is currently 26. Her job opportunities will drop off sharply as she gets older. There are a very limited number of acting roles for middle aged and older actresses and Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren seem to get all of them. To wit: there are three roles for actresses in Hollywood; the hot chick, the assistant district attorney and driving Miss Daisy. (NSFW)
Having said all of that, it isn’t as if she actually advocating for a more equitable tax code or better safety net for the rest of the US.
@8 Yes, always.
If you actually work for a living, you will NEVER be as wealthy, or even have a chance at being as wealthy as the investor class. It is literally impossible, because investments of the kind the wealthiest of the wealthy have, have the opportunity to have invariably outpace the income of people who actually work for a living, both in terms of how much you actually get paid for working vs. investing. Even billionaire CEOs and the like, the bulk of their wealth doesn’t come from earned income, it comes from investment income–generally things like stock options, investments, etc. The tax code just exacerbates the inequality.
What is your definition of “wealthy”? You mention superstar athletes and many of them (like LeBron, for example) are unquestionably millionaires but they are never going to be billionaires. They won’t even have a chance at it. They can only be superstar athletes for so long, whereas investors can invest forever. Even pro athletes that get advertising gigs or transition into another media career (sports commentator, broadcast or cable news reporter), the bulk of their money comes from investments.
Larry Ellison is an investor. He made his initial fortune in the budding IT industry but the bulk of his fortune comes from investing.
He bought an entire island in Hawaii. How many superstar athletes can afford to do that? Or media stars?
How much money does his daughter Megan stand to inherit? How much is her father’s wealth helping her now?
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/megan-ellison-annapurna-scott-rudin-temper-1234951651/
So to be clear, Sydney Sweeney is wealthy. But she has to work and her work status is and always will be unstable.
Megan Ellison, also in the movie business, as a business owner, can afford to fail, to screw up, take long absences from her job and not have it affect her life or her income in the slightest.
That’s the difference between people who work for a living, even at highly compensated and privileged careers, vs. people who live off of investments.
@17 Maybe? Probably not? Part of her job/career is making the social rounds, sometimes in person, sometimes online. But the bulk of her job is in Hollywood, which means that she will need to live in Hollywood. The real estate in Hollywood is not cheap and it is a better investment to own rather than rent. Her house is an investment and honestly, it isn’t a bad one.
@14
Probably an underpaid and exploited woman, who are generally the people who take care of other (wealthier) people’s children.
Something tells me that Sydney Sweeney will not buck the trend of the wealthy paying their employees a pittance while demanding the sun, the moon and the stars.
Childcare in the US is frequently a shitshow of low-paying exploitation.
Kinda makes you wonder. Where is the meritocracy the right is always bragging about?
=8)-DX @14: Years off? Seriously? After 4 months I was itching to get back to paid work. Who would hire a non-old woman, knowing she could disappear for years, and all her experience with her?
@anat
What makes you think only women have a right to parental leave in civilized countries?