Good Craic from Jordan Peterson
Published
Warrior and rabid defender of the US Constitution. We strive to remain financially friendly. Amen😇
Warrior and rabid defender of the US Constitution. We strive to remain financially friendly. Amen😇
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Thank you for this, Simon.
Somebody somewhere, I don’t know who, said that people nowadays are almost guaranteed to escape poverty if they do three things: graduate high school, get a job, and wait until they are married to have children.
I am not great with money, and am not in much of a position to lecture anyone, but….I can think of two people I have known, both of them female, whose money problems, I believe, stemmed from being totally out of touch with reality. One was a very hard working single mother of three children. She and her children had been homeless in the past, but when I met her she was in an apartment and barely scraping by, but scraping by. She was expecting several thousand dollars from the earned income tax credit. I encouraged her to put that money in the bank, so that she would have emergency funds. She said that she was going to use all of the money to buy furniture. She was driving around in an ancient car, really just scraping by, but she wanted to buy furniture? And she couldn’t be talked out of it. So frustrating.
Another woman I know has not really worked in over a decade. She lives off of her husband’s disability, which, judging from the cars they drive and recent home improvements, must be pretty good. My friendship with her ended because she would not stop hitting me up for money. I drive a car that is almost 15 years old: she went out with her husband and bought two-not just one, but two-almost brand new cars with all kinds of features, and then proceeded to tell me that she did not have money for food or medicine. I suggested that she get a delivery job-delivering groceries, or newspapers, or whatever, because those jobs are very easy to get. She told me, 20 seconds after telling me that she had no money for food, that a delivery job wouldn’t pay enough and would not be worth her time. But asking me for money was worth her time, apparently. She couldn’t seem to grasp that the reason I had fewer money problems than her was because I live within my means and I have a regular income. She seemed to entertain this fantasy that I was surrounded by people who just couldn’t wait to give me money: she told me that she envied my “support system.” In her mind, a support system is a group of people who will hand you money whenever you ask for it, no questions asked, and she blames her financial problems on her lack of such a support system.
I wanted to tell her that isn’t a human being on planet earth who has the kind of “support system” she thinks I have, but it was clear that there wasn’t much point in trying to tell her anything. She lives in a very rich fantasy world.
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Obviously, many or most who live in poverty have serious drug and/or mental health problems. The two women I just described were not addicts of any sort-drugs and alcohol were not the problem, in their cases. But, I would argue that both of them lived in a fantasy world. Their mental health problems were not severe enough to attract attention, but they both live in a total fantasy world.
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“The richest 25 Americans are paying less than all Americans.”
Horse feathers! (And believe me when I tell you I’d prefer to use another word beginning with “f”).
The 1% of the 1% income earners in this country pay 35% of the total IRS bill. 49% of Americans pay no federal taxes at all. Where in the world is the money coming from?
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And may I add that if you taxed all the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffets, etc. 100% of their income, Washington still couldn’t afford itself.
We don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem.
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I can’t stop now…
I pay my acct a healthy amount of money because he has saved me (legally of course) tens of thousands of dollars over the years in income taxes.
I WILL NOT SUPPORT A GOVT THAT SMUGGLES 4,000 HAITIAN REFUGEES INTO MY STATE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND DISTRACTS MY GOVERNOR FROM DOING HIS REAL JOB.
Under the Trump administration, our billionaire businessman/governor, Rick Scott, was able to spend 70% of his time out of state poaching businesses in the Rust Belt to re-establish themselves in Florida and add to our booming economy. He didn’t approve of our dependence upon tourism and this was before Covid.
Foresight? Certainly, but Trump allowed him the luxury to act on it!
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Another addendum:
Elon Musk has officially been identified as the richest man in the world- surpassing Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffett, etc. and he will pay more income taxes than any American in history this year.
With that said, I’ve never been particularly fond of him and do not include him among the greats- Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan who created great wealth without Obama govt subsidies. However, I have enormous respect for his intellect and response to Senator Warren (who accused him of being America’s biggest freeloader on twitter):
“Senator ‘Karen’; you don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of academia and go start up your own business.”
Bravo!
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P.S. No offense meant here to my favorite historian who also has the ability to think like a financial. 🙂 🙂
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Wisdom from Dr. Peterson on ‘equality of outcome’ and the multi-faceted problem of homelessness (among other things.) I’m plowing through his meta-text: “Maps of Meaning” (1999) from which “!2 Rules” and “Beyond Order” were distilled. What a voice for this time and place.
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