“It is so insulting…

… when someone says, ‘oh just do a budget, you’ll be fine ‘. What people need is a living wage, not a budget “.

So. Lots to unpack there. Right off the bat, when someone who is making millions of dollars a year looks at a person struggling to pay bills, assuming that person is making less than 20-25 an hour and is struggling due to high prices and low income, and tells them to budget better, the implication being that person is irresponsible - that is just downright condescending and just plain… Daddy Warbucks. It’s on par with Marie Antoniette saying, “let them eat cake “. It’s like GOP congressman from Utah, Jason Chaffetz telling poor people on a TV show that the reason they’re poor is because they need to stop buying new iPhones and invest in their healthcare instead. Kind of like poverty is a choice kind of deal. What made the congressman’s comment even worse is the day after, the GOP introduced a bill to give HUGE tax breaks to what amounted to be the CEOs of the largest health insurance providers. Sort of like government welfare for you and me but not for thee because you are poor, and you bought an iPhone. YES - aspire to be successful, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, but while you do that, how dare you want nice things when you are poor. That puritanical discipline only applies to people less well off than people like CEOs who are quite capable of paying off congresspeople to vote for them huge largess from the treasury and how dare poor people try to get their fair share. Talk about fair share, imagine if it applied not only to paying taxes for everyone but everyone getting their fair share of funds from Uncle Sam.

Yes. People are rigging the system to keep millions in poverty by enriching even further those who have already amassed fortunes the Sun King would be envious of. Yes, it sucks. Yes, there is nothing we can do about it as individuals. Yes, it is condescending and flippant to think like that and to say it out loud. Yes, those kinds of people have no shame. They are hypocrites and they are liars and frauds who milk the system for every penny, and they use their office to do so and while stealing everything not nailed down, they dare to lecture us about how to live. It's this arrogant and "I'm better than you because I know how to steal better than you" attitude is getting really tiresome. You know the old notion that a lot of people got wealthy because they are smarter than us, or they know something we don't, or they invented something, or they did XYZ... In reality, the way the system is set up is to disproportionally benefit the wealthy, that is just a fact. It is easier for a person to save 100 dollars if they have already saved 99 before and it is easier for someone to get on the board of a company or get elected to Congress to pass laws to benefit their friends, who will employ them with huge salaries once they retire from Congress if those people already belong to the right country clubs and the right families. Yes, it makes me angry also just like any normal person would get angry that the vat majority of our fellow Americans are not only locked out of participating the in the wealth sharing but worse than that, there is a huge tug of war being unleashed onto us, by those who control the strings, so that we continue to blame and fight each other rather than to try to peacefully change the system to be more just and fair to everyone. I find people like Rep. Chaffetz a reprehensible human being. The man has the heart of a Huckleberry Finn king, and he puts it on wide display.

But…

Having said that… folks who are struggling, who are having a hard time making ends meet, who can never seem to get ahead no matter how hard they work, they do need to get and maintain a budget. Even if to keep track of where their little money is going. What their bills are. Who they are paying. What they are paying.

I will be the first to say that asking those who are already struggling, who can’t seem to catch a break, to sit down and squeeze whatever little money they have left, potentially giving up the one thing in life that brings them pleasure of buying an iPhone, is a sad commentary on life and how we have not progressed any since the 1400s in taking care of ourselves and our planet in a lot of ways.

But…

Building a budget might be the tool that will finally allow someone to slowly start climbing out of the red. To find ways to change things, if nothing else to see what their finances are like. The only way to fix something is to know where it is broken. It’s hard to say it any way that doesn’t sound condescending, but the people who need the budgeting process the most, are those who think they have nothing to budget.

When someone who is saying it in a condescending manner, “get a budget” people get angry at them and they should. But just because there are so many jerks out there, doesn’t mean someone should throw away the opportunity to try something that might actually help them.