Yesterday, I started watching an American woman’s latest video. I stopped watching after she explained that it was the stimulus checks that had enabled her to start doing what she does these days.
I have heard similar stories a few times before. I have not heard one single similar story from the UK or the Netherlands. In the UK, some people got into financial difficulties because they for example had only just started a business when the pandemic struck. In the Netherlands, financial support offered to business during the pandemic was generous – until it resulted in massive tax debts that caused many businesses to fail.
Those American successes were Trump’s doing.
I haven’t read one single story of someone in America getting into financial difficulty because of the support offered during the pandemic.
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The same woman makes over 40,000 a year when she works for DoorDash.
That type of flexible work is not possible in the Netherlands. When these companies, such as UberEats, started this in the Netherlands, they got criticized for exploiting people. They now all only offer fixed-hours part-time or fultime employment contracts; working flexibly the way Americans are allowed to do this to top up or generate income as needed is not done in the Netherlands. As far as I can tell it’s mostly teenagers and people just over 20 who do food and grocery deliveries.
Background: The woman in the video was a corporate trainer, but she was also a party animal. It got her in trouble with alcohol and she lost her job. She is great and very down to earth. She wanted to get her life together financially and began vanlife – also not allowed in the Netherlands. In addition to DoorDashing, she also briefly had a serving job (when she wanted to be there for her son, and stayed local).
Her YouTube channel took off and now also provides her with income. That is allowed in the Netherlands. Getting monetized is very hard, by the way. Some of the requirements are very easy to reach but one set of them looks near-impossible (over a million shorts views, things like that).
Empowering people to do their own thing to top up their income, for example through flexible work, or to lower their expenses, for example through vanlife, that’s not a Dutch thing. Dutch people are largely all expected to do the same things and in the same age brackets as everyone else. Of course, you can buck this, but you’ll meet with a tremendous amount of resistance from people around you, you’ll run into regulations that will try to strangle you and you’ll have to stealth a lot of the stuff you do.
Robberies carried out by very young people – teenagers – are on the rise in the Netherlands.
A lucrative undertaking in the Netherlands is buying, placing and maintaining vending machines, for example at hostels or fitness clubs, but that requires capital to get going.
