Fox Business panel suggests millennials should worry about inheriting wealth instead of climate change
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From the October 28, 2019, edition of Fox Business' Cavuto: Coast to Coast
CONNELL MCSHANE (GUEST HOST): So you might not have thought this, but millennials could actually become the richest generation ever, and of course, it's thanks to their parents. A new study out showing that millennials are set to inherit $68 trillion from their parents by the year 2020, and this is right up your alley, Chris, this kind of thing. Millennials get a bad rap, and then wonder what they'll do with the money. Maybe people will start asking. But this is something else. It's already, by the way, a lot. There's 618,000 millennial millionaires apparently out there, according to these numbers.
CHRIS HOGAN (AUTHOR): Yeah. This is -- I mean, we're about to go through one of the largest wealth transfers in history. And if these millennials don't have a game plan and don't understand how to handle it --
MCSHANE: You see a business opportunity for yourself.
HOGAN: This is going to be a very short transfer window. Meaning that the opportunity to go out and invest in things they don't understand, not setting up their next generation. This is the mindset. Legacies don't happen by accident.
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DEROY MURDOCK (NATIONAL REVIEW): I want to see them get the money. I don't want to see Uncle Sam get the money. [CROSSTALK] Kill the death tax once and for all. No taxation without respiration, as Steve Forbes said. Let's get rid of the death tax, these people get their money, and either invest it in new companies, give it away, philanthropy, do whatever they want with it. They'll do a much better job with the money than will Uncle Sam.
MCSHANE: Quite the contrast, right, from these conversations we have about millennials wanting, you know, being supportive of leftist economic policies or the like, your point is, maybe they shouldn't be. But go ahead.
HEATHER HIGGINS (INDEPENDENT WOMEN'S VOICE): To Chris' point, it's long been understood in sociology circles that the difference between being poor and poverty is the mindset about time. And if you are focused on this week or this month or even just this year, you are likely to be in a poverty situation for a very long time. The higher up you go the income ladder, the higher the probability that people are not just thinking about my lifetime, but the next lifetime and maybe even the generation after that. And the real correlate between doing well is how far ahead you can look and take seriously. So my biggest concern with the millennial cohort is there doesn't seem to be a lot of long-term looking. A lot of them think the world's going to end in 12 years, it ain't. And so they need to look beyond that in order to handle this wealth well and wisely.
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MURDOCK: This also suggests they'll be able to have more success paying off their student loans, their credit card debt, et cetera. Maybe getting a lot of this debt off their backs, which is enormous right now.
HIGGINS: It also implies that they won't be as dependent on the entitlements that can't really survive under their present structures anyway. So I think you could start seeing a political impetus -- they don't believe they're actually going to get Social Security, they're not as -- they won't be as dependent as a cohort, there will obviously be individuals who are, and that will allow a political conversation to happen that's not happening now.