7 ms·

Because the system makes sure people stay poor. How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividen

by sparkie 14y ago

Because the system makes sure people stay poor. How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)? Or how many of you were taught how to become "employable" so that you can earn the same amount of money and pay considerably more tax, unavoidably - because you aren't in control of your own finance. How many of you were taught to open a bank account as a good way of "organizing your finances" (read: filling the pockets of fat men). How many of you were taught anything about running your own business and being in control of yourself and your securities? There's a reason this isn't taught in public schools folks - it's because the people at the top want more for themselves and less for you. They don't care about you - except when you're gullible enough to believe you're making a choice when voting season arrives. The poor are poor because they think "that's just the way it is," and continue about their lives. It's only when you realize that's not the way it should be, because you're being fucked, that you start to do something about it and make yourself. Then there's the moral effect. You either see the need to do something to change the system, and remain poor - or you accept it, and realize that the best way for you to make more money is to keep poor people poor (and gullible) - thus prolonging the system.

mindcrime 14y ago
There's a lot to be said for that. If somebody had really sat down and hammered me on the power of compound interest and taught me a little bit about the capital markets, when I was, say, 14 or so... I think I would have made a lot of decisions differently and would probably be better off today. Although, to be fair on this point, I'm not sure it would have helped, because I can't - in retrospect - say that my 14 year old self would have taken those lessons to heart. You think about time differently when you're young... the idea of saving for "the future" and building wealth slowly... would I have appreciated the idea of Dollar Value Averaging back then? Hmmm... hard to say. But anyway, I agree with you in principle, sparkie. What we're taught about how the world works, when we are young, is tremendously influential.
- sparkie 14y ago
  I only really discovered the advantages of creating my own business when I was around 23, I'm 25 now. I also got into a significant amount of debt in order to get a degree to make me more "employable" - and I'm still paying it back. I'm perhaps most irritated by this because I'm mostly self-taught (in computer science) and university did very little for me. I should've studied business instead, but probably like you suggest, I would've considered that idea incredibly boring at school leaving age. Boredom aside though, I do wish I'd learned more about business and life in general during school. I'm still trying to learn my way around the system now, but there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm sincerely grateful for the people who've taken the time to explain things to me anyway.
  - tmzt 14y ago
    Maybe what we need is less of a udacity for coding and one for business, expressed in a way anybody can understand but not as rigid as a bschool or mba program? Reading the Thiel lectures for instance is very educational but without the basics how do you apply something like that?
    - joshkaufman 14y ago
      That's what I do: http://personalmba.com http://personalmba.com. Business is not that difficult once you know the basics. The best place to start is my book: http://personalmba.com/book/ http://personalmba.com/book/ Hope you find it useful!
      - mindcrime 14y ago
        You're the guy behind PersonalMBA? Awesome, I have the book and I love the site. I haven't put as much time into it as I should, as I've been too busy with the nitty-gritty, day-to-day "stuff" of doing a startup. I do fully intend to get through the Personal MBA stuff eventually; but right now, I'm spending more time with the stuff from Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, etc. :-)
  - lsc 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
taskstrike 14y ago
This is a cynical and unrealistic way to look at it. The poor seems to blame the system for failures instead of blaming themselves. That to me is the biggest difference. By blaming a system, they take the power of self improvement away from themselves. You assume all those things should be handed to you when most people acquired those knowledge on their own. By the way, that first statement is incorrect. Dividends is taxed twice, a first time as the income of a company, a second time when it comes to you. Wage is taken out as a cost so it's taxed once.
wtn 14y ago
> How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)? You shouldn't do that, it's not permissible under current tax rules… IRS requires that officer shareholders be paid a reasonable salary, and if you're making enough money to pay dividends, minimum wage will be hard to justify as "reasonable." I'm not sure how paying bonuses will help with tax avoidance as those are taxable like regular wage income.
- sparkie 14y ago
  IRS only applies to US companies. Each country has it's own different loopholes that allow you to pay less tax if you're earning more. The big corps pay far less tax than they should. Note to term, "tax avoidance". "Tax evasion" is illegal, but there are plenty of legal ways to avoid tax, many of which I'm not aware of myself, but will be grateful for anyone willing to share. And that's a big part of it - people don't share the knowledge - it's "insider" knowledge, and you aren't in the club. The fewer that know, the more money those who do, can make.
  - hij7898 14y ago
    1) Wealth is not zero-sum. 2) You're recommending that we defraud our federal government in your original post. Just stop.
    - sparkie 14y ago
      I'm not recommending you defraud your government, or do anything illegal - I'm recommending you do the same thing that every big corp does - pay the minimum tax they are required to by law, and no more. People are led to believe that the richest pay ~40-50% in tax, or whatnot depending on where you are - but that couldn't be further from the truth - they generally pay less (as a percentage of their total earnings) than the middle or working classes. You know, when these bankers pay themselves a $9 million tax free bonus at the end of the year - are they defrauding the government? Work it out, say a banker is on a nice $1m salary, which he pays 50% in tax, but pays zero tax on his fat $9 million bonus.
herdrick 14y ago
It sounds like you're talking more about things that could help middle class people. Very few poor people have issues that could be helped with "pay [themselves] a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend".
- sparkie 14y ago
  Sure it'll help the middle class with out current system, but the point was more about how all people should value themselves. Rather than selling your time in exchange for money (i.e., being an employee), you are better off exchanging your value for money. This should apply to any class really. The reality is different for poor people, but my point was more about "what could be", rather than "what is". Trying to think about it in terms of the current system is flawed, because the current system is designed to enrich people. If everyone was avoiding tax then the tax would need to rise, or the laws would need to change - this may or may not be a good thing to the masses - but it's certainly not a good thing to the rich - which is why they make sure it doesn't happen.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    You got downvoted for saying it but honestly I would expect this philosophy of selling value to apply more to the poor since they're typically not able to make themselves look "employable" anyway. If you're selling a service or a product no one has to know if you attended a top university.
learc83 14y ago
>There's a reason this isn't taught in public schools folks - it's because the people at the top want more for themselves and less for you. While I agree with you that schools should do more to encourage people to own their own business, do you really think school curriculums in the US are decided by a shadowy cabal of the wealthy? Whether to teach business and entrepreneurship would be almost entirely up to the local school district. There are thousands of them and each one is independent--that's a pretty far reaching conspiracy. I know members of my local school board, and I can assure you they aren't part of the "people at the top" trying to keep the poor man down. The real reason people more people aren't self employed is that we've managed to link health insurance with employment.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Read/Watch "Manufacturing consent". It doesn't need to be a wide spread conspiracy. Once you get some kind of environment established people lower down the tree will perpetuate it themselves with no outside stimulus.
rprasad 14y ago
What you have suggested is tax evasion. You must pay yourself reasonable rates, otherwise, you will be treated as evading employment taxes. For a white collar job, that means significantly more than minimum wage. The penalties (higher back-interest rates and fines) for tax evasion are quite severe. Jailtime is also a possibility.
- sparkie 14y ago
  I've not suggested tax evasion - stop exaggerating. The only point I've mentioned is one of tax avoidance, which is in common practice. I've not advised you to do it either, just making a point that it is done - the system is unfair - people avoid tax (legally), whilst you are paying your honest share. And please, Americans - are you able to think outside of your own country and it's laws?
nl 14y ago
If you really think it is tax that is making people poor (ie, your number 1 & 2 suggestions) then you may wish to consider other factors.
lsc 14y ago
Do you really think the average business owner makes more as a business owner than they would as an employee? I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I'd find that surprising. I know I'd be making 3x-5x what I'm making now if I was working for other people. Yeah, running a business means that you have a possibility of making a whole lot of money, and yeah, if you have the contacts to get investors to give you money in a situation where you get paid well if things go well and the company closes (with no fallthrough to you) if things go poorly, sure, you are doing pretty good; but that's not how most real businesses work.
- skilesare 14y ago
  I think you're doing it wrong. I quit working for a company about a year ago and am on course to make 2.5x what I made last year. A small business should never be run in such a way that the employees are making more than the owner. How would any business work that way? People typically pay a premium for a temporary service rather than employing someone full time. That is how you make money. It is why I pay a plumber a crap ton when my pipes break because it is still cheaper than employing one full time. What business are you in that causes you to make a third of what you would make as an employee doing the same thing?
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    You need to take your total compensation into account when figuring how much you're making now vs. how much you were making as an employee. Consider the following things an employer pays to/for you in the US: -OASDI contributions -401k match -Stock -Generous portion of health insurance premiums -Vacation, holiday, and sick time In a tech business with an office and Valley-level benefits, the all-in cost for an employee is ~2.5x their base salary. Here [1] is an old article by Joe Hadzima talking about how this is figured. [1] http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-...
  - lsc 14y ago
    >A small business should never be run in such a way that the employees are making more than the owner. How would any business work that way? I don't see anything wrong with that; as the owner, the upside accrues to me, so it makes sense that I'd be willing to work for less compensation in the short term. (I've been in situations where my compensation was negative while employees were getting paid. If you can't get investors, it makes a lot of sense, I think. For me, even living in silicon valley, after $40K/year or so, the improvements to my life brought by every additional dollar diminish rapidly, and as I'm in silicon valley, 3x-4x that is not unreasonable compensation for my skillset, even sticking with year+ long gigs; this is how I funded my company until recently.) >People typically pay a premium for a temporary service rather than employing someone full time. That is how you make money. It is why I pay a plumber a crap ton when my pipes break because it is still cheaper than employing one full time. That is not how I make money. Selling hours... is difficult to scale. My goal is to get into a situation where my capital (plus a little bit of scalable labour, or labour I can easily hire out because I've worked in the field my entire life and I can recognise good people) multiplies every year. You know, own some means of production. Become, as the communists would say, bourgeois. This is part of why my marketing message is so consistently "we don't provide a lot of support" - I'm happy to accept a slightly lower (but still ridiculous, by investment standards) return on my capital if the labour bit becomes more scalable. So yeah, that's why I'm willing to take a loss on my labour (or even on total compensation) - for the chance to have a business that grows without being limited by my labour. I'm renting, essentially, unix servers, so while my capital equipment depreciates at a terrifying rate, my capital is my primary tool for generating revenue. (and as far as investments in capital go, the margin on VPSs is pretty high. A server will pay for itself in under 4 months, on average.) I mean, the whole revenue of the company is about a quarter million a year right now, which is about what me and my full timer would get paid, combined, if we both went and worked for a local big company. (the lion's share of that is eaten by power and new hardware.) I know why I'm here; revenue doubles every year, and this is the sort of business where capital cancan make money with minimal labour, I mean, potentially I'm sitting on something that can double my capital investment every year. I mean, if I don't screw it up. But yeah; if you are looking at a business that scales? this long period of not getting paid a whole lot is pretty normal. You go out and buy a retail store? a restaurant? etc, etc, - it's going to be a long time before you earn back the initial investment. It's really only contracting/consulting where you make more from day one; and that's a great way to get your hands on some capital, but from my point of view, long-term? it's not nearly as attractive as having my capital do the work. Now, I think I'm stabbing in the right direction, but it has yet to be seen if I'm doing it wrong. Certainly, if I sold today for 1x revenue (not at all unusual for small businesses) I'd have made less money for more work than if I had just done consulting for that time period and put the money in T bills or whatever. But if current trends continue; it doesn't take very many years before we're talking about real money. (now, such doubling never continues forever. But I don't need forever. I'd be dang comfortable with another 3.)
zithtar 14y ago
I hate these "it's the system" arguments almost as much as I hate argument ignoring the systemic issues entirely. It's clear that in your world view, a bunch of rich, white "fat men" (read: Republicans, according to you) are controlling everything from banks to schools to everything else. I feel sorry for you. The world is not the gigantic conspiracy you've created in your mind.
drivingmenuts 14y ago
> How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)? That's the one I don't get. At tax time, it's still income. It's not like that bonus/dividend is magically untaxed because it doesn't show up bi-weekly or monthly. The rest of isn't taught because The Man wants to keep you down - it's because teachers aren't taught those things either (at any level) and most of them have enough on their plate just trying to satisfy state requirements. You make it sound like a grand conspiracy of old, rich white people and it's not. What the wealthy do have that most of us do not is the access to resources and a bit more free time to use those resources because they're not scrambling for a dollar like the rest of us. I generally agree on the rest of it, but I'll add this: sometimes you're so far down a hole that the existence of light or that someone gives a damn about you is not even imaginable. Sure, you may have people that will get your back in a tight spot, but that's a far cry from knowing people who can make your life materially and spiritually better and would willingly do so.

by sparkie 14y ago

mindcrime 14y ago

There's a lot to be said for that. If somebody had really sat down and hammered me on the power of compound interest and taught me a little bit about the capital markets, when I was, say, 14 or so... I think I would have made a lot of decisions differently and would probably be better off today. Although, to be fair on this point, I'm not sure it would have helped, because I can't - in retrospect - say that my 14 year old self would have taken those lessons to heart. You think about time differently when you're young... the idea of saving for "the future" and building wealth slowly... would I have appreciated the idea of Dollar Value Averaging back then? Hmmm... hard to say. But anyway, I agree with you in principle, sparkie. What we're taught about how the world works, when we are young, is tremendously influential.

sparkie 14y ago
I only really discovered the advantages of creating my own business when I was around 23, I'm 25 now. I also got into a significant amount of debt in order to get a degree to make me more "employable" - and I'm still paying it back. I'm perhaps most irritated by this because I'm mostly self-taught (in computer science) and university did very little for me. I should've studied business instead, but probably like you suggest, I would've considered that idea incredibly boring at school leaving age. Boredom aside though, I do wish I'd learned more about business and life in general during school. I'm still trying to learn my way around the system now, but there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm sincerely grateful for the people who've taken the time to explain things to me anyway.
- tmzt 14y ago
  Maybe what we need is less of a udacity for coding and one for business, expressed in a way anybody can understand but not as rigid as a bschool or mba program? Reading the Thiel lectures for instance is very educational but without the basics how do you apply something like that?
  - joshkaufman 14y ago
    That's what I do: http://personalmba.com http://personalmba.com. Business is not that difficult once you know the basics. The best place to start is my book: http://personalmba.com/book/ http://personalmba.com/book/ Hope you find it useful!
    - mindcrime 14y ago
      You're the guy behind PersonalMBA? Awesome, I have the book and I love the site. I haven't put as much time into it as I should, as I've been too busy with the nitty-gritty, day-to-day "stuff" of doing a startup. I do fully intend to get through the Personal MBA stuff eventually; but right now, I'm spending more time with the stuff from Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, etc. :-)
- lsc 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

taskstrike 14y ago

This is a cynical and unrealistic way to look at it. The poor seems to blame the system for failures instead of blaming themselves. That to me is the biggest difference. By blaming a system, they take the power of self improvement away from themselves. You assume all those things should be handed to you when most people acquired those knowledge on their own. By the way, that first statement is incorrect. Dividends is taxed twice, a first time as the income of a company, a second time when it comes to you. Wage is taken out as a cost so it's taxed once.

wtn 14y ago

> How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)? You shouldn't do that, it's not permissible under current tax rules… IRS requires that officer shareholders be paid a reasonable salary, and if you're making enough money to pay dividends, minimum wage will be hard to justify as "reasonable." I'm not sure how paying bonuses will help with tax avoidance as those are taxable like regular wage income.

sparkie 14y ago
IRS only applies to US companies. Each country has it's own different loopholes that allow you to pay less tax if you're earning more. The big corps pay far less tax than they should. Note to term, "tax avoidance". "Tax evasion" is illegal, but there are plenty of legal ways to avoid tax, many of which I'm not aware of myself, but will be grateful for anyone willing to share. And that's a big part of it - people don't share the knowledge - it's "insider" knowledge, and you aren't in the club. The fewer that know, the more money those who do, can make.
- hij7898 14y ago
  1) Wealth is not zero-sum. 2) You're recommending that we defraud our federal government in your original post. Just stop.
  - sparkie 14y ago
    I'm not recommending you defraud your government, or do anything illegal - I'm recommending you do the same thing that every big corp does - pay the minimum tax they are required to by law, and no more. People are led to believe that the richest pay ~40-50% in tax, or whatnot depending on where you are - but that couldn't be further from the truth - they generally pay less (as a percentage of their total earnings) than the middle or working classes. You know, when these bankers pay themselves a $9 million tax free bonus at the end of the year - are they defrauding the government? Work it out, say a banker is on a nice $1m salary, which he pays 50% in tax, but pays zero tax on his fat $9 million bonus.

herdrick 14y ago

It sounds like you're talking more about things that could help middle class people. Very few poor people have issues that could be helped with "pay [themselves] a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend".

sparkie 14y ago
Sure it'll help the middle class with out current system, but the point was more about how all people should value themselves. Rather than selling your time in exchange for money (i.e., being an employee), you are better off exchanging your value for money. This should apply to any class really. The reality is different for poor people, but my point was more about "what could be", rather than "what is". Trying to think about it in terms of the current system is flawed, because the current system is designed to enrich people. If everyone was avoiding tax then the tax would need to rise, or the laws would need to change - this may or may not be a good thing to the masses - but it's certainly not a good thing to the rich - which is why they make sure it doesn't happen.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  You got downvoted for saying it but honestly I would expect this philosophy of selling value to apply more to the poor since they're typically not able to make themselves look "employable" anyway. If you're selling a service or a product no one has to know if you attended a top university.

learc83 14y ago

>There's a reason this isn't taught in public schools folks - it's because the people at the top want more for themselves and less for you. While I agree with you that schools should do more to encourage people to own their own business, do you really think school curriculums in the US are decided by a shadowy cabal of the wealthy? Whether to teach business and entrepreneurship would be almost entirely up to the local school district. There are thousands of them and each one is independent--that's a pretty far reaching conspiracy. I know members of my local school board, and I can assure you they aren't part of the "people at the top" trying to keep the poor man down. The real reason people more people aren't self employed is that we've managed to link health insurance with employment.

flyinRyan 14y ago
Read/Watch "Manufacturing consent". It doesn't need to be a wide spread conspiracy. Once you get some kind of environment established people lower down the tree will perpetuate it themselves with no outside stimulus.

rprasad 14y ago

What you have suggested is tax evasion. You must pay yourself reasonable rates, otherwise, you will be treated as evading employment taxes. For a white collar job, that means significantly more than minimum wage. The penalties (higher back-interest rates and fines) for tax evasion are quite severe. Jailtime is also a possibility.

sparkie 14y ago
I've not suggested tax evasion - stop exaggerating. The only point I've mentioned is one of tax avoidance, which is in common practice. I've not advised you to do it either, just making a point that it is done - the system is unfair - people avoid tax (legally), whilst you are paying your honest share. And please, Americans - are you able to think outside of your own country and it's laws?

nl 14y ago

If you really think it is tax that is making people poor (ie, your number 1 & 2 suggestions) then you may wish to consider other factors.

lsc 14y ago

Do you really think the average business owner makes more as a business owner than they would as an employee? I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I'd find that surprising. I know I'd be making 3x-5x what I'm making now if I was working for other people. Yeah, running a business means that you have a possibility of making a whole lot of money, and yeah, if you have the contacts to get investors to give you money in a situation where you get paid well if things go well and the company closes (with no fallthrough to you) if things go poorly, sure, you are doing pretty good; but that's not how most real businesses work.

skilesare 14y ago
I think you're doing it wrong. I quit working for a company about a year ago and am on course to make 2.5x what I made last year. A small business should never be run in such a way that the employees are making more than the owner. How would any business work that way? People typically pay a premium for a temporary service rather than employing someone full time. That is how you make money. It is why I pay a plumber a crap ton when my pipes break because it is still cheaper than employing one full time. What business are you in that causes you to make a third of what you would make as an employee doing the same thing?
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  You need to take your total compensation into account when figuring how much you're making now vs. how much you were making as an employee. Consider the following things an employer pays to/for you in the US: -OASDI contributions -401k match -Stock -Generous portion of health insurance premiums -Vacation, holiday, and sick time In a tech business with an office and Valley-level benefits, the all-in cost for an employee is ~2.5x their base salary. Here [1] is an old article by Joe Hadzima talking about how this is figured. [1] http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-...
- lsc 14y ago
  >A small business should never be run in such a way that the employees are making more than the owner. How would any business work that way? I don't see anything wrong with that; as the owner, the upside accrues to me, so it makes sense that I'd be willing to work for less compensation in the short term. (I've been in situations where my compensation was negative while employees were getting paid. If you can't get investors, it makes a lot of sense, I think. For me, even living in silicon valley, after $40K/year or so, the improvements to my life brought by every additional dollar diminish rapidly, and as I'm in silicon valley, 3x-4x that is not unreasonable compensation for my skillset, even sticking with year+ long gigs; this is how I funded my company until recently.) >People typically pay a premium for a temporary service rather than employing someone full time. That is how you make money. It is why I pay a plumber a crap ton when my pipes break because it is still cheaper than employing one full time. That is not how I make money. Selling hours... is difficult to scale. My goal is to get into a situation where my capital (plus a little bit of scalable labour, or labour I can easily hire out because I've worked in the field my entire life and I can recognise good people) multiplies every year. You know, own some means of production. Become, as the communists would say, bourgeois. This is part of why my marketing message is so consistently "we don't provide a lot of support" - I'm happy to accept a slightly lower (but still ridiculous, by investment standards) return on my capital if the labour bit becomes more scalable. So yeah, that's why I'm willing to take a loss on my labour (or even on total compensation) - for the chance to have a business that grows without being limited by my labour. I'm renting, essentially, unix servers, so while my capital equipment depreciates at a terrifying rate, my capital is my primary tool for generating revenue. (and as far as investments in capital go, the margin on VPSs is pretty high. A server will pay for itself in under 4 months, on average.) I mean, the whole revenue of the company is about a quarter million a year right now, which is about what me and my full timer would get paid, combined, if we both went and worked for a local big company. (the lion's share of that is eaten by power and new hardware.) I know why I'm here; revenue doubles every year, and this is the sort of business where capital cancan make money with minimal labour, I mean, potentially I'm sitting on something that can double my capital investment every year. I mean, if I don't screw it up. But yeah; if you are looking at a business that scales? this long period of not getting paid a whole lot is pretty normal. You go out and buy a retail store? a restaurant? etc, etc, - it's going to be a long time before you earn back the initial investment. It's really only contracting/consulting where you make more from day one; and that's a great way to get your hands on some capital, but from my point of view, long-term? it's not nearly as attractive as having my capital do the work. Now, I think I'm stabbing in the right direction, but it has yet to be seen if I'm doing it wrong. Certainly, if I sold today for 1x revenue (not at all unusual for small businesses) I'd have made less money for more work than if I had just done consulting for that time period and put the money in T bills or whatever. But if current trends continue; it doesn't take very many years before we're talking about real money. (now, such doubling never continues forever. But I don't need forever. I'd be dang comfortable with another 3.)

zithtar 14y ago

I hate these "it's the system" arguments almost as much as I hate argument ignoring the systemic issues entirely. It's clear that in your world view, a bunch of rich, white "fat men" (read: Republicans, according to you) are controlling everything from banks to schools to everything else. I feel sorry for you. The world is not the gigantic conspiracy you've created in your mind.

drivingmenuts 14y ago

> How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)? That's the one I don't get. At tax time, it's still income. It's not like that bonus/dividend is magically untaxed because it doesn't show up bi-weekly or monthly. The rest of isn't taught because The Man wants to keep you down - it's because teachers aren't taught those things either (at any level) and most of them have enough on their plate just trying to satisfy state requirements. You make it sound like a grand conspiracy of old, rich white people and it's not. What the wealthy do have that most of us do not is the access to resources and a bit more free time to use those resources because they're not scrambling for a dollar like the rest of us. I generally agree on the rest of it, but I'll add this: sometimes you're so far down a hole that the existence of light or that someone gives a damn about you is not even imaginable. Sure, you may have people that will get your back in a tight spot, but that's a far cry from knowing people who can make your life materially and spiritually better and would willingly do so.