2 ms·
I can only speculate why my initial comment here was voted up - then down. The issue here wasn't that he was collecting unemployment while bootstrapping -- its
by alttab 17y ago
I can only speculate why my initial comment here was voted up - then down.
The issue here wasn't that he was collecting unemployment while bootstrapping -- its that he simply didn't tell the Texas Workforce Commission.
If you have a start up, and you tell the unemployment office, they may still give you the full compensation
(although I wonder if we would have received the maximum allowed benefit).
When you sign up for unemployment they ask you if you are current self-employed. He had his name on a DBA, had a fully functioning website up describing his business - and withheld this information from TWC.
This is illegal.
- gojomo 17y agoDon't sweat the random walk of comment scores. Good comments sometimes wind up negative based on the arbitrary tastes of the last few voters. Even if attempting "self-employment", if there's no money coming in, it's arguable as to whether it should be called that for the purposes of some government form. Trying earnestly to launch a new corporation isn't precisely "self-employment", either. If it succeeds, you get some mixture of capital gains, dividends, and W-2 income -- none of which may ever be classified for tax purposes as "self-employment income". Scrappy bootstrapping doesn't map neatly into the fixed labels and "hours worked", "wages earned" boxes of a state bureaucracy. Unless I was an employment lawyer, a judge, or a TWC functionary, I wouldn't confidently pronounce someone else's self-reported status as "illegal". (I know I felt differently in my 20s. I'm more tolerant of different routes to self-sufficiency, now, as long as they're in the right spirit.)