People Are Sharing The Stuff Rich People Say That Is Total BS, And I Am Fuming Right Now
Rich people loveeee to talk about poor people and why others aren't as rich as them. But most of the time, what they say is super out of touch.
So when Reddit user StatisticianEvery733 asked, "What is something rich people say that is bullshit?" I was ready to hear about all the stupid crap rich people say that we all know is false. Here are the most clueless statements people submitted.
1."'Money doesn't solve everything.' Although technically true, I can't think of a problem I have currently that wouldn't be solved by wealth: job stress, family stress (related to money), debt, exhaustion with the housing market, worry about retirement, lack of time during the day, health concerns (many of which are actually money concerns), feeling down about life due to lack of time to pursue my own interests...the list goes on."
2.Similarly, "'You can’t fix problems by throwing money at them.' You can when the problem is they don’t have enough money. Specifically thinking about public schools for this one."
"As if 'hiring someone to fix it' or 'get a replacement' wasn't throwing money at issues. There are very few issues that money cannot massively help to fix."
3.And also, "Money can't buy happiness."
4."I actually work for a few wealthy people, and the amount of times I've heard 'I'm poor' or 'I have no money' is absurd. I've actually said something (nicely) a few times because they both have talked in front of the other staff like that and it's just ridiculous."
"They are multimillionaires. I do some bookkeeping for them. Aside from the very large homes, multiple cars, boats and extravagant vacations, they have loads of money in their banks accounts (savings and checking) not to mention stocks and retirement."
5."'We all have the same 24 hours in a day.' Not if you have to cook, clean, shop, wash up, laundry, work 9–5, travel in traffic, budget groceries, etc..."
"Like, technically sure, however, somebody who has to take public transportation everywhere does not have the same 24 hours as somebody who has a car and driver or private jet."
"A rich friend I had couldn't understand how it could take me hours to plan and grab groceries. I have to check for coupons, ongoing sales, etc., and plan meals accordingly, then take the metro to the nearest grocery store and back. Meanwhile, he just ordered his groceries online and had them delivered to his doorstep. Same 24 hours a day indeed..."
6."Live within your means. Like, all I buy is enough food for one meal a day and gas to get to and from work, and I'm still living paycheck to paycheck."
7."'We aren’t rich. We are comfortable.'"
8."When rich businessmen/entrepreneurs claim that not paying their fair share of taxes helps them invest in their community and provide jobs. Everyone should pay PERIOD."
"Bezos isn't making Amazon if poor people don't fund the building of roads and bridges for him to deliver packages. Or if we didn't build the internet for him to sell those packages. Or if we didn't fund public education to train an able workforce to build the company for him. Or if we didn't pay police officers to stop people from punking him out of his inheritance.
The rich benefit disproportionately from what taxes fund, and they should be made to pay disproportionately into the tax base when they get richer. Not to 'punish' their success, but to enable it."
"'If you cut corporate taxes they will hire more people.' Never works. Why hire more people than you need?"
"The wealthy are already spending what they want to spend. You only need so many houses, cars etc...Giving more money to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts, subsidies etc., only causes an increase in wealth disparity, as we've seen happening since about 1980.
Same with corporations. Big corporations are already at a point of equilibrium regarding meeting the demand of their customers. Giving more money to big corporations isn't going to cause them to expand and/or increase compensation to their employees (lol, who ever fucking believed they would do that?) They'll increase pay to the owners/investors/shareholders etc. They'll manipulate the market to their advantage via stock buybacks which were made legal right around the time Reagan had begun implementing his 'trickle down' economic policies. I'm sure that was just a coincidence tho, right?"
9.And that money "trickles down."
"We in fact get far less from the corporate world than before. Prices getting raised by the same companies that don't increase the wages. It is literally the opposite."
10.That they're "'self-made.' That $100m head start wasn't that big of an advantage."
"Even those who start with "nothing" typically got a hidden edge somewhere. Take one of history's best examples: Mr. Rockefeller. Yes, he lacked the cash in the family, also lacked the kind of marriage or parents to bring him into high society. So how did he start his empire? In school he was sitting next to the son of a banking house — a man who could borrow 'some' money with few questions asked and later on could loan out huge sums for securities that only existed on paper. .... A very, very profitable friendship that peaked when Standard Oil was officially forced to be split up and a presumably 'barely fluent' Mr. Rockefeller combined with a certain friend brought up all the filet pieces leaving the unprofitable rest for the competition."
"Bill Gates’ private high school was one of the very few schools with a computer in 1968."
"Also, his mom convinced the board at IBM to use Microsoft for their OS. She was on the board of directors at another company, where the Chairman of IBM was also a board member."
11.Or similarly, "'I worked my way up from the bottom!' When the bottom is freshly graduating with a fully paid-for degree by mommy and daddy. Then starting a business with a $2 million loan."
12."'I worked hard for what I have.' Implies people doing without don’t work hard. They work just as hard if not harder, for far less."
13."You'd have more money if you didn't spend it on coffee and avocado toast."
"Just save money, don't buy expensive coffee, and in just one or two short millennia, you could buy your dream house!"
"They literally think it’s iced coffee making us poor and I’m like okay, I splurge on Starbucks a few times a month, but every other day I’m drinking nasty ass great value coffee so idk maybe it’s the internet bill going up every year and the expensive insurance that doesn’t cover anything and the $75 copay. Maybe it’s the rent increase every year or the car payments and the fact that I haven’t had a pay increase in literal YEARS."
14.“Just work hard and you can get to where I am someday.”
"If someone works hard, and a lot of things happen in a very specific order that leads to great success, that person immediately attributes all of the success (usually financially) to their hard work and little else.
People fail to realize how many external factors play into someone climbing that ladder to becoming very well off financially in their respective fields. Many factors upon which they as an individual had little to no control over to begin with.
Yes, someone doing the bare minimum is far less likely to climb that ladder as fast, if at all versus someone who's busting their hump and working tirelessly to further their career. That being said, the person busting their hump can do so, and still go nowhere. No one owes that person anything, least of all their employer.
So what, they've gone 'above and beyond.' Some employers reward that kind of work ethic....others exploit it and put up walls, keep dangling the carrot, and would rather keep you in line right where you are."
15."'If I was able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, anybody can do it.'"
"Remember the original phrase was something like, 'As useless as trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.'"
16.In times of turmoil, when rich people say, "'we all need to make sacrifices.' Just google private plane flights and emissions, or the mansions and vacations of the rich. That'll radicalize you real fucking quick."
17.Also during times of turmoil, when a company or rich person says "We are in this together"...especially when it's accompanied by "now, more than ever."
Suggested by u/3nvious and u/2ndprize
"Christ alive, commercials from 2020 were insufferable."
18.Or similarly, "We're all in the same boat."
"We are all in the same boat, but it's not like a Caribbean cruise. It's more like the Titanic, where the third class drowned."
"Nah, more like you're working in the boiler room to pay for food and board on the ship."
"We're basically all like the crew of the Titanic, whose families received letters indicating that their dead relatives were no longer employees of the company as of the time the Titanic hit the iceberg, and could they please send $50 to cover the uniforms they didn't return."
19.One specific example? When a bunch of rich celebrities got together and recorded the "Imagine" video, as if an off-key song by rich people who would be just fine without their jobs or ability to leave their homes would fix everything, or make anyone feel better.
Suggested by u/Jaegernaut-
"Omg, that COVID video still pisses me off. All the celebrities singing in their mansions while millions of people with minimum wage jobs had no work."
20.Similarly, when celebrities complained about being stuck at home in the pandemic...in their luxury homes. For example — "Wasn’t it Ellen DeGeneres who was complaining about how being stuck in her mansion was like being in jail?"
21."Even better was two months later when they (along with the 'small business owners') all complained that the little wage slaves would never return to work again because they finally knew what a living wage looked like through the unemployment support programs."
22.Specifically, the whole "nobody wants to work" thing businesses and rich people kept spouting...including Kim Kardashian.
Suggested by u/gus248
23.“'This is the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do' (cue layoffs of thousands while writing themself a bonus)."
24."Poor people are just lazy! If they really wanted to not be poor anymore, they'd just [insert solution here that involves money or time the poor person doesn't have, because they are poor]."
25."When it comes to starting a business, selling a product, or chasing your dream: 'All you need is passion' (or some version of that). I've heard successful people give this advice because they don't know what else to say, but every rich guy I know has zero passion for the product they sell. ... They care about if it can make money, about holes and demands in the market, or about creating those demands. They have passion for making money."
26.Relatedly, “'If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.'”
"I’ve had jobs I’ve loved; sometimes, they were still shit jobs."
"I know plenty of people who found that doing what they love for a living caused them to fall out of love with it after a while."
27.“'I’d rather go back to when I was broke and happy.'”
28."That they deserve their money. Nobody 'deserves' money. We need it. It is a way to get resources. It should be shared."
29.“'More money, more problems.'”
"Might be true in the absolute literal sense in terms of “number of problems”, but in the grand scheme of things the scale of those problems is drastically lower.
I would rather deal with 100 'I can’t keep track of all the things I bought'/'My friends keep wanting more money'/'My fancy Italian car keeps breaking down because Italians don’t know how to make cars properly'/'Oh no, the contractors on my second house dipped on me' every single day for the rest of my life if it meant I never had to think, 'Okay, if I skimp on groceries and just don’t have lunch for the next week I’ll be able to make rent in full on the first' again, even once."
30."Any form of socialism is communism."
"Even better, just basic human decency is socialism. I don't like living in the richest society on earth and a huge group of selfish dicks think providing children free meals at school is bad or not worth spending money on."
"The fact that we’ll shell out TRILLIONS for the military-industrialized complex without any qualms, but feeding our own country’s hungry children for a few million is up for debate is in fact, cruelty."
31."That you get rich by providing goods and services to people. The rich get rich by inserting themselves in a system that underpays those who actually provide goods and services."
32.And finally..."'I got rich doing these 10 things I mention in my book.' No, you got rich with the money desperate gullible idiots give you when they buy your bullshit book."
What is the most out-of-touch or ridiculously inaccurate thing you've heard a rich person, CEO, trust fund baby, or celebrity say? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
