Tag Archives: ethics

Leaving Stuff to Heirs

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A man wrote to The Moneyist regarding his question of “fairness.” He and his wife are on their second marriages, and each has two biological children. The man has a million dollar inheritance from his parents, all of which he intends to pass to his biological children. His wife says that if she survives him, she intends to leave all of their common estate to her biological children exclusively. The man asked whether his wife’s intention was fair.

The Moneyist writer answered, in part:

A spouse’s inheritance is deemed separate property. So it is fair to leave it to your own biological children, if that’s what you want to do. Community or marital property, acquired during a marriage, goes to the surviving spouse. They can do whatever they wish with it.

That’s the purely legal answer. The writer, however, went on:

Your wife has made her plans clear. If she dies before you do, however, her kids could have a problem, because you plan to split the estate four ways, reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.

“Reducing your stepkids’ inheritance.” That distorts the matter. The man’s tacit plan, were he to survive his wife, to split the marital property four ways increases his biological children’s inheritance markedly from the complete shutout his wife plans for his kids while still leaving half the property to his wife’s kids. He could choose, per his legal control over the estate as the surviving spouse, to leave it all to his biological kids, shutting out his wife’s kids as she intends to do his.

The merits of the two spouses’ positions—what you and I, and The Moneyist, think is irrelevant. What’s fair is what the two spouses agree is fair.

There’s another lesson here, too, for blended families. The husband and wife, while they’re still prospective husband and wife, need to work this sort of thing out before they marry. If a disagreement over future plans for their prospective estate becomes a deal-breaker, it’s far better to know that in advance than after the marriage has occurred and then existed for some time. Of course, in the present case, there isn’t enough data regarding the timing of the man’s inheriting relative to their marrying to judge whether they could have worked this out in advance.

Is the Question Irrelevant for Children?

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Toothpaste manufacturers put fluoride in their toothpaste and market that as good for tooth health. They also recommend, through their toothpaste labeling among other pathways, to use only “pea-sized” dabs for children under six and “rice-sized” dabs for children under three.

Associated with all of that are concerns that too much fluoride can negatively impact IQ scores. My question: are fluoride and the question of IQ impact really relevant for children?

For one thing, those tiny dabs are extremely hard to dole out in any consistent fashion, especially as children are taught to brush their own teeth (and to apply their own toothpaste to their brushes), and it’s easy to err by adding increasingly larger dabs.

For the more important thing, though, children’s teeth are impermanent and start to fall out and be replaced with adult, permanent teeth around six and a little older. Maybe the answer, at least regarding children, is to duck the question altogether and use non-flouridated toothpaste for these. At that age, the important task is to train them in tooth hygiene and regular brushing. Any toothpaste adequate to the task of cleaning teeth would serve.

Another Misleading Claim

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This one by a Progressive-Democrat: California’s Alex Padilla. In his Tuesday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, he wrote regarding Republicans’ musings about overruling the Senate’s Parliamentarian on the matter of California’s legal right to set its own emissions standards (itself a misleading claim, since what’s in question is whether California, or any State, can set emissions standards more stringent than the Federal government’s),

Republicans are now considering overruling Ms MacDonough, essentially going nuclear and throwing out the rule book in order to get their way.
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If they can ignore the parliamentarian on this….

This is so broadly misleading as to approach being deliberately false. Far from ignoring the Parliamentarian, Republicans would be taking her eminently seriously and following Senate rules regarding her ruling, whether voting to overturn it or the Senate’s presiding officer overruling it.

Of course, Padilla knows this; he’s merely demonstrating, with his distortion, why it’s next to impossible to deal with members of his party.

An Example of Global Warming

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This one comes from a remark in an article centered on a partially built and then abandoned US military base in the frozen north of Greenland.

The base was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan, known as Project Iceworm, to build a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. The underground site, which was designed to store 600 medium-range ballistic missiles, reveals the extent of US involvement in Greenland going back over half a century.

What happened to it, then?

Camp Century, as the outpost was called, was partially constructed in 1959, and abandoned in 1967 after the ice sheet was deemed too unstable to support the proposed missile-launch network.

Then this happened:

Over the years, ice accumulated and the facility is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.

“Over the years” is 58 years (57 at the time it was rediscovered), and in that short time all that ice—not snow—built up over the site.

Oh, wait—that’s not an example of global warming, it’s an example of the foolishness of the “global warming” mantra of the mainstream Left.

I Want My…Maypo

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Late in the Biden administration, as the lede notes,

Documents obtained by The Free Press from the Environmental Protection Agency reveal that, despite handing out $20 billion in grants to eight nonprofits just before President Donald Trump took office, the federal employees who reviewed grant applications had concerns about high salaries, conflicts of interest, and oversight of taxpayer money.

After he was confirmed to the office, EPA Secretary Lee Zeldin

called for a Department of Justice investigation and had the money, most of which resided in 129 Citibank accounts, frozen.

Naturally, the NGOs are suing, because they want their filch fruits restored. Just to be sure, they’re also suing Citibank, whose since the freezing has been nothing but obeying a government directive, which they have to do unless and until a court overturns the directive.

Never mind that the staffers expressed, in writing as part of their reviews of the grants during the application process, concerns about excessive-seeming pay for NGO executives; NGOs’ cost claims that had no explanation, much less rationale, for them; or apparent lack of oversight planning.

It’s illustrative of these NGOs’ entitlement mentality that they think they should have the money just because they want it. It’s also one more reason for the necessity of taking several machetes to the jungle undergrowth of Federal government spending.