Hey, there! Log in / Register
Women with too much money?
By adamg on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 8:56am
Rich People Reporter Sarah Schweitzer is back with a report on the latest Hot Thing: Rich pregnant women who hire "baby planners" to stock their nurseries because they are terrified of all the tough decisions they'd have to make by themselves at Babies R Us.
None of the planners she interviewed have actually had babies themselves, but that's OK, because they get kickbacks referral fees from companies whose products no doubt are the absolute best ever made.
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Woman with too much money.
Woman with too much money. Yikes, 250 to assemble a baby registry... If you cant even tell people what to give you for free without spending 250 youve got too much money on your hands.
I think the bigger issue here is women who obviously dont have much of a family/friend support system from which to pull from. When you have a network to pull from there is always someone around who has had a baby in the past 5 or so years. Ive heard these conversations in my family, "thats a ripoff, buy those, ignore that feature, my son hated XYZ but loved Q" and half the time the mother to be ended up with the stroller she was looking for for free because the person she was talking to kept it in perfect condition in the closet, waiting for when someone else would need it.
Seriously who spends 30 hours researching a stroller only to hire someone for 500 dollars to buy it for you.
Women?
I think part of the problem is that the female half of the breeding equation is expected to take care of all this crap, and work full time, and prepare for a leave, and be pregnant and tired all the time.
Why is it said that the "women have too much money", as if such women are purely silly preggo beings who have had their brains removed and wallets plumped, when there is usually a guy involved who is also making these vacuous and panic-stricken decisions?
Heck, as an experienced mom, maybe I could make some money on the side here - and justify my fee in money saved and mistakes not made. Craigslist is your friend! Rah rah Children's Orchard! Is baby dry, warm, fed, hugged, comfortable and loved? Good - baby doesn't give a soiled diaper that the crib was purchased at a yard sale in an upscale neighborhood for $60 - nor will the next carefully tended occupant when it gets sold again for $25.
The guys
Get to put the crib and changing table together - and go on shopping trips for just the right Dutalier glider - although I suppose the husbands of the sort of women who hire "baby planners" probably hire guys to do that for them.
But, yes, good point. I wrote "women who have too much money" because the story only talks about women. But then, adding men into the discussion might complicate the story and Sarah Schweitzer is all about the simplification - pretty much everything she writes involves reducing her topic du jour to a single, simple "trend" - even if she has no real data to back up her thesis (wow: Four women in the Boston area set up two "baby planner" services - that's a trend!).
Women are brought up in this
Women are brought up in this instance because this article featured women exclusivly and was written by a woman, men were left out of it completely.
I agree with the second hand stuff. I think my mother got her crib from my aunt and then my mother went on to use it for 3 kids, then gave it to her niece. Someone paid a bundle for it at one point, so it was very solid, even 25 years later.
As an experienced mother you would be available to someone in your family who needs advice. Just think you could be saving them 1,000 in consulting fees alone just by telling them what to look for. Not to mention what can be saved by not buying the most expensive everything they can find.
been there, doing that
I'm the one who goes off list for baby showers and gets the stuff people don't know they will need. Like the small changing bag I got for a friend. She said "oh, but we got the big bag, but maybe this will do sometimes". The moms in the crowd all smiled their best "that's gonna be your purse" smile.
A year later, said small changing bag was spotted in their family office, keys attached, wallet and checkbook spilling out, coffee cup in side pocket ... simply said, you don't take the gigantic expedition barge of a diaper bag to the grocery store or bank with you when all you need is a backup diaper and pad.
I even know where the most expensive items/splurges bought during the small child era are!
1. changing area. This was a bureau with a topper for changing. We removed the topper eight years ago. The bureau is still in use.
2. Tough Traveller backpack. We used it for 5 years, now my niece has it and will likely still use it for the next three years.
3. Burley D'Lite bicycle trailer. Still in use as grocery cart and loaner to family/friends/neighbors. Used for kids for six years. Now it hauls groceries and beer like no other. It worked great hauling a heavy load when the minivan battery died and I did a core trade at the auto parts store.
Well, she's got all of us hooked, doesn't she?
Sarah Schweitzer is merely bringing the form that the WashPost and NYTimes Style sections long ago perfected to the pages of the local broadsheet. Think of her as Lisa Belkin Lite. She finds a handful of people engaged in a practice guaranteed to provoke controversy, dubs it a newsworthy trend, and writes it up. Her trends almost always sit right at flashpoints in the culture wars. And her articles have the wonderful effect of endowing the reader with a sublime sense of moral superiority to the affluent and privileged - at least, the reader breathes with a sigh of relief, I bought my own $750 Bugaboo stroller. I wasn't one of those ridiculously overprivileged women who needed someone else to buy it for me. (And in Boston, we never need much excuse to refight the battles of privilege and wealth.)
Here's the thing, though. In this era of declining circulation, is this really so bad?
Sure, it's not journalism. Or at least, it serves no discernible public interest or purpose. It offers a somewhat more sophisticated version of the cheap-thrills of the supermarket check-out line. But then, newspapers have long been full of content that doesn't serve any noble purpose. The puffery that passes for automotive journalism springs to mind - car reviews exist solely to provide a pretext to run an entire section stuffed with car ads. Travel sections are similar, too - is there really a new hotspot every week? why is it that there's never any unpleasantness in any of these cities or countries?
I've tolerated that for years, because it subsidizes the parts of the paper about which I actually care. Newspapers have long performed a sublime bit of alchemy, taking revenues from coverage of various tawdry topics, and re-channeling it into news coverage. Hard news alone is not a self-supporting activity; it never has been.
So if Schweitzer sells papers (and it's fairly clear she does) I'm fine with that. They can run her puffery off the front page, so long as they keep it below the fold. Frankly, it's nice to see the Globe pander a little bit to its readership; unless it learns to rebalance serious coverage and popular stories, its days are numbered. And as long as the Globe continues to place its first emphasis on serious news, it's welcome to subsidize that by employing a dozen Sarah Schweitzers, if that's what it takes.
Rich people spending their
Rich people spending their money is a good thing. It makes them a little less rich, and it circulates their money back through the economy. Never begrudge wealthy people spending money - it's a good thing. Scrooge McDuck sitting in a pile of gold coins - that's a bad thing.
I just wonder how much good
I just wonder how much good it does the rest of us if they spend 1,000 on a stroller that was sold to them at a botique that is owned by someone with just as much money as them, and the employee is making minumum wage. The construction of the stroller in China, and the shipping handled by a company owned by the UAE.
Also
The store pays rent which pays real estate taxes. The baby-goods-salespeople live here and participate in the wider economy and pay taxes. The transportation companies shipping the goods do also.
Perhaps if we investigate wholesale opportunities in this space, take a risk and go buy a few (hundred) lots of baby goods from Chinese manufacturers, and then sold them to a supply vendor here, we could also participate in this little slice of business?
taxes? Bwahahahaahaha
The store pays rent which pays real estate taxes. The baby-goods-salespeople live here and participate in the wider economy and pay taxes. The transportation companies shipping the goods do also.
The store makes a profit which is a fraction of the total cost of the item. After the business owner is done writing off everything under the moon (including their car and such), any profit leftover from that is taxed.
Transportation costs have to be small. If you think any sort of substantial tax is paid by the major shipping conglomerates, you're batshit insane. They're HQ'd in small island countries with no reporting requirements or taxes.
The same is true for the company that made the stroller in China for $10-20, and is thus making an order-of-magnitude profit. The money goes into an offshore corporation (or a state like Deleware), and we don't see a dime, even if the company's "headquarters" is here. One simple way this is done: the real company "licenses" the trademark from a holding company. That license just so happens to be the year's profits.
Back in the 50's, the corporate share of taxes was about 50%. Now, it's about 2% or less.
So take what he just said
So take what he just said and think about this for a second... You go on craigslist and find a perfectly acceptable crib that is in great condition. You obviously replace linens and the mattress but you just saved yourself a fortune. You pay the person 50 dollars and use the rest to buy more stuff or you save it.
If you save it you add more money to the banks , so more people can borrow. If you spend it somewhere else your infusing money into the economy. By giving the woman down the street 50 dollars for her crib you are directly injecting 50 dollars into the local system, which is most likely more (money in the local economy)than if you were to spend 700 at the baby boutique.
Wow, and I thought I was the
Wow, and I thought I was the Cynic.
Your numbers on corporate taxes are simply wrong. They represent 2% of the GDP, not of the tax burden. There are any number of ways to count this stuff, but if you want an apples-to-apples figure, in 1950 they accounted for about 5% of GDP. Or, to put that differently, they fell from about 28% of federal revenue in 1950 to roughly 10% today. So yes, they've fallen substantially, for a variety of reasons - partially because other revenue streams of increased in importance, but also because successive administrations embraced the gospel of the free market with heedless disregard for the consequences of reckless tax-cutting. But still, no matter how you count, their share is well over 2% of taxes.
But let's get to the core of your argument. What, precisely, are you proposing as an alternative? That people not spend money? That they purchase only locally-produced products? Neither of those options strikes me as practical, much less as conducive to economic growth or to spreading prosperity more broadly.
The model here might be UPPABaby, a locally-based producer of premium strollers. Yes, it outsources all of the production to Taiwan - just like every other stroller manufacturer. But the design, management, sales, and repair functions are based right here in Massachusetts. When it manages to operate in the black, it will pay its taxes in this state. As it grows, it will employ more locals. And it sells mostly through boutiques, which are locally owned small businesses. If it tried to build the stroller in Massachusetts, it couldn't compete with foreign-produced strollers. Frankly, I'm delighted that there's a business like UPPABaby in the Bay State, even if I think their products are obscenely expensive. Better here than in the Netherlands.
Your gripe seems to be with the tax system. Fair enough. Our tax system is riddled with loopholes, excessively generous to the wealthy and to corporations, and insufficiently progressive. But while it's the tax code we've got, consumer spending (that's not debt-financed) is still good for our economy; and when we fix it, it will be even better. So what, exactly, is your objection?
excessively generous to the
And yet, as any economist will tell you, the US's corporate tax rate is significantly higher than the tax corporate tax rate in liberals' beloved European countries -- even the sainted nordic ones.
Because apparently unlike politicians here, European politicians, for all their many faults, apparently understand the concept of "tax incidence".
Suffice it to say that any tax on a corporation isn't paid by the corporation at all. It's paid, in varying proportions depending on the specific of what the corp does and what its market space is, by customers (in the form of higher prices), employees (in the form of lower wages), and shareholders (in the form of lower profits).
Taxes?
Wow, where did this come from? It may be your opinion, but it's far from fact.
Prices - Barring collusion and other external forces, prices are market driven. The ultimate profit, and therefore tax, is an after-effect. Raising prices doesn't necessarily mean higher profits (unless you're in the oil business... ;-) )
Wages, generally, are also market driven, whether you like it or not.
Profits are before taxes. No profit, no tax. Dividends (if any) paid to shareholders are after taxes. Stock price should not be affected by taxes.