'Baby Bonds' Could Help the U.S. Wealth Gap
Duke University professor William “Sandy” Darity and his onetime student Darrick Hamilton, currently serving as director of Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, have proposed an interim step dubbed “baby bonds.” The bonds, averaging $25,000 but rising to as much as $60,000 for the poorest children, would be federally managed to increase by a guaranteed annual rate of 2 percent. The cost of up to $100 billion would be less than 3 percent of the U.S. budget. As they explain to Bloomberg News’s Matthew Boesler, the bonds would seek to minimize the wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest, regardless of race.
