Work and pay.

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Work and pay.

You do your work, you get paid. Simple as that. Say you make two thousand dollars a month. Good for you. That definitely puts you ahead.

Then you go home. Ah, yes, forgot about that. Do you rent your place ? Well, that's 1k back to the bank. You own ? Oh, excellent. That's 1k for the mortgage, 100 bucks interest and 50 bucks insurance. 1.15k back to the bank. Don't sweat it, you get a tax deduction for your mortgage payments (Well, not the payments, just the interest, but still. It's money back to you. 0.1% or so, but still. Bravo. Well done.)

On the positive side, if you own, you will still have the house fifty years from now. Come to think of it, what will you need it for, then ? But anyway, here's a funny thing. Everywhere outside the civilized world, they use bricks and concrete to build something that will still be standing in 500 years, rain or shine or hurricane. That thing costs to buy maybe 20, maybe 50 thousand. Land included, forever. In the US, they build things out of a sort of wood chips with glue paste, no foundation, so that if you run your car into it, the house will suffer more damage than the car. It's faster to build, and cheaper, and less labour intensive. Hail progress. Unfortunately, that also means it's harmful to the environment, lasts less and doesn't create much in the way of jobs. The hell with all that crap, except for one thing. The house you will end up paying half a million for is not going to stay up more than fifty years. Out of the question. So, logically, it's costing you 10k a year. On the other hand, the "uncivilized" people of the world, with their old fashioned, non high-tech houses made of actual stone and brick get them for 100 bucks a year. Serves them right for being out of the loop.

So, after the rent you still have half your pay. Odd how it is that in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and South America they get by perfectly on a hundred or so for rent. Then again, they live in the absolute ass of the world. For instance, there's no highways there (or traffic jams), because not everybody can actually afford a car (which, come to think about it, puts you at an advantage, if you have a car). They don't have fast foods (then again, any woman can cook, and for the twenty MacDonald peels of you, she'd make breakfast too)

Now out of your thousand, there is insurance to be paid. First off, medical insurance. That is a wonderful thing, medical insurance. A good part of it works as follows : you pay to have all the toxic junk they put in you as part of the privilege of living in the "civilized" side of the planet taken out. Another part is the idiot's payout. Since the party receiving the services is not the party paying for them, the provider of the services has an excellent opportunity to overcharge. Which it obviously will. Any idea what an aspirin costs in a hospital ? For curiosity's sake, pick out the next batch of invoices when you get sick, or by all means look in your documents stash, or borrow from a friend. Find one item that is not overpriced ten times, you win a prize. Lastly, you well know that if you will ever need anything that is not "common practice", which is to say if you will ever need anything of that which presumably makes medical service better in the US than in Cuba, you will have to spend five to ten hours a day discussing the matter with accountants at the insurer's office. It goes something like this :

"Hello, I am carrying your medical insurance"
"Hello sir, thank you for your excellent choice of medical insurers"

"Thing is, I have cancer, doctor told me."
"Which doctor is that ? Because if he is not on our list of approved doctors, he is most probably wrong and you don't have cancer"

"Ah but you see, I visited three of the ones on your list, and they didn't know what it was. Eventually I had to go see a specialist"
"But he's not on our list"

"It doesn't matter if he is or he isn't, says so right in our contract paragraph bla bla" (kudos to you for doing your homework, what was that, ten hour's worth of research ? Volunteered out of your own time and unpaid ? Awww, you're such a dear)
"Ah, yes, well I will have to refer you to my superior"

Weeks and weeks go back and forth, you talk to dozens of people, who are getting paid for their time trying to not pay you (you aren't) after they were paid for their time trying to sell you insurance (in other words wasting your time)

Fact of the matter is, you are paying half of what was left in your paycheck for "insurance" which really is one of the following

concealed corporate health damages, or in other words money some corporation should have paid for poisoning the public, except nobody caught them

massively overpriced common service, which you could easily get for a fraction of the cost anywhere in the world

someone to try and keep you from getting special treatment that would not be easily available anywhere else in the world.
A well spent five hundred. Then there is car insurance. Since it's mandatory in most states, there is obviously no telling exactly how these premiums are used. Imagine someone makes you buy something at gunpoint. Would you seriously consider the money you paid translates to value of purchase 1:1 ? You pay a hundred or so a month, on the condition you never crash your car. If you do, premiums go up. Considering a car costs about 20k, new, and for the couple hundred million cars moving around there are maybe one million crashes a year, even thinking all those end up in completely cindered cars leaves us with about one hundred dollars a year actual cost, per car. You pay ten times that in insurance ? I wonder why. Oh, wait, and if you crash you pay even more ? Why am I not surprised. As above, it's called idiot's payout. Since you don't have a clue as to what's under the hood, and you don't pick the bill, what's to keep garages from charging whatever they feel like ?

Various and sundry property insurances will eat up the rest, so you are down to 250$ of your original pay. Are they a good buy ? Probably just as good as the other 750$ or so you spent on this sort of crap already. And since you have a car, might as well buy some gas. A figure of speech really, seeing how of the 3 bucks a gallon gas costs, 2.70$ are excise. That's right, gas price has 10% to do with the Middle East, crude oil reserves, market dynamics and so forth. The rest, it has to do with government greed. That excise chips away another hundred or so off your money, let's say.

Now you're left with a crisp hundred bill and some change, and you will have to survive on that an entire month. That means you really live on three dollars a day, not much unlike a poor African in Nigeria. The only difference is that food there(all natural, no preservatives, organic, etc etc) costs maybe five cents a day at an all you can eat buffet. Your hamburger is ten bucks, and no self respecting homeless bum in any poor country would feed his dog that sort of filth.

Oh, and let's not forget. To land your good paying job, to fulfill your dreams, and get yourself a real career you did go to college right ? Good for you. That means you carry fifty or one hundred thousand in debt since day one right ? Just the interest comes to five hundred or a grand a month, right ? That's excellent you have credit, because that way colleges can charge you twenty thousand a year for well...nothing. You can get a library pass for free, and learn absolutely everything they can ever teach, and more, in four years. You can get excellent books on virtually any subject for the customary 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Except if they are called texbooks, somehow, magically, they cost 100 or more. What a racket. They are essentially pushing a brothel, charging you to live on a campus and meet nubile young women, because other than that, there's nothing there you couldn't get for a fraction of the cost, by yourself.

Seems you are now in the red. You have worked an entire month, and have less money than when it all started. Excellent job, keep it up. You are contributing something to this country, and all of it is praying you will never learn to do basic arithmetic. Besides, it's all going to get better soon anyway, you're all set for your big break. Right ?

15 people quit their job in protest.

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this page was made using a bent spoon. anything else is for failures