Personal Story with A Soundtrack - Take A Look Around

Here I go again on my own,
going down the unpopular opinion road,
the only road I´d ever known.

Like a drifter, I was born to pay taxes.
And I truly don´t mind at all.

Yes, I know everyone else hates paying taxes.
Let me be the contrarian, as always, or maybe most of the time!

Everyone is calling out that we are all going broke:

Everyone and their flees is saying prices have doubled if not tripled.

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I don´t buy it

I am calling BS on all of the spoiled brats. This stuff gets me so annoyed I had to get my personal big-picture view of my chest, my way (or the highway).

I took a look around and did some digging just some basic stuff like water and fuel.
In 2020 I paid exactly the same for my water as I do today, 15 Euro monthly.

In 2012 when I had a car I paid about 1.30 euros for a liter of fuel twelve years later it´s 1.57! That is less than a screaming 2% increase per year over a 12-year period.

Oh and those poor kids of us will be able to buy a place, when they are grown all baby boomers will have left the stage called life.

I am not totally blind

Those were the first things that I could quickly check, now of course I am not stupid af. I also noticed that I am paying more for some products.

My frozen fries are up 40%, but just have a look at basic stuff like flower. We are below the prices of the 2012 crisis.

I am not blind, I see the peak but the market got over it, but the people did not.

The Blind Spot

We live in a Global economy where everything is focused on getting things done in the cheapest way. Unfortunately cheap often comes from afar and that means lots of bottlenecks along the way.

This causes any crisis to make goods more expensive.
Countries are no longer equipped to be self-sufficient, deal with it, or don´t buy it.

Our Money Is Worth Poo

Again I am not blind to governments printing more money, creating more debt than they can ever pay for, and the impact this can have on fiat currency.

But looking around me we are not poor, not yet, and no mo poor than I was growing up.
We struggled growing up, we could not go on holidays, I could not get Nike or Levis, and I missed out on absolutely nothing because of it.

Now I am old.
Old enough to have been through the introduction of the Euro (scam) and I felt the pain all the way back in 2002 and mainly those years shortly after.

I have been freaking homeless working two jobs because I could not find an affordable place to rent.
I ate nothing but bread during that last week of the month because I had spent it all already.

In all honesty, if I had spent my money wiser, I would probably not have had to go through those things.

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In my unpopular opinion, it´s poor choices that make us poor.

The current generation thinks that going on a holiday at least once a year is a human right???

Did they actually get history lessons showing what the middle class looked like during the Industrial Revolution?

Poor Us

Look at that shit show!
It was during that poverty period that people were getting education and the middle class got more rights, going from nothing to something.

Then take a look at where we are now....
Global projects trying to improve the lives of those who need it most. Lots of that money ends up in the wrong pockets, but again going from nothing to something at least.

Schooling Globally is up. And even in the land of the so-called free things got better.

Trends are never a straight line, trust me I know.
But the big picture provides us with a positive trendline for many scenarios.

Now everyone is going to bring their own fantasy theories and numbers but just look at global poverty in 1800 and now.

Cry Babies

Not sure if this is just the generation of spoiled crybabies, but damn dudes and dudettes life is good in 2024.

OMG I am having to pay taxes.
I don't want to pay taxes.
It´s My money!
I should be allowed to decide what to do with my money!

Mate you are getting that income based on the fact you pay taxes. Salaries are set up in such a way that they can cover the national cost. Or at least that is the basic aim, and then people grab some because people are greedy.

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That greediness is for both the people collecting taxes and the ones trying to avoid taxes.

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You pay taxes, have fun staying poor!

That used to be quite true you know, back in the days of Robin Hood you paid taxes to the Sheriff and King John

Now trust me or not, those taxes never ended up serving you. They only hurt.

They still hurt, but some of those taxes do not end up in the pockets of the rich like they used to do. Some actually go towards improvements that benefit more than just the rich,

Yes I know, we all love pointing out the failures in the system but when I take a look around I see;

Decent roads
Houses with plumbing
No/less kids in factories
Healthcare & Waiting lists
Free basic education
People working 8 hours or less five days a week and still complaining.

Take a look at history

Going way back, a popular assumption was that the hunters and gatherers worked less than 40 hours a week to gather what they needed to survive

When people hunted, gathered, and farmed, they worked as much as they needed to survive, which probably amounted to a lot less than 40 hours a week.

This is such a joke, I tried that, and trust me, getting enough to feed, cloth, and keep your family warm is a hell of a lot of work. Defending yourself against nature is hard work, and all farmers know if you have land, you can not take a day off.

Back to the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, it was common for workers to log 70-hour, six-day workweeks in the newly mechanized factories.

When the US government started tracking working hours in 1890, the average full-time manufacturing employee clocked 100 hours per week.

Henry Ford became one of the first employers to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week at his Ford Motor Company plants in 1926. He was not just responding to pressure from the labor movement, though, because he saw employment as a way to grow the middle class—his customer base.

Take off those millennial goggles and take a look around, we now have time to care about the environment, gender, equal rights, pansexual relationships, or being bipolar. Things that without time and education would never have crossed anyone's mind because all of us would be hungry, sleepy, working too hard, or running away from sabertooth tigers.

And no I do not discard the fact that people struggle nowadays, but peeps you are meant to struggle. At least nowadays you can struggle while having a toilet and not having to share your bed with animals to keep warm.

Do I Like Paying Taxes

I am not a sadomaso, but I don´t mind paying taxes. I know that it keeps the current system in power, but looking back it was never better than today. Progress is slow and painful, life and taxes should hurt. If you don´t hurt, if you don´t struggle, you never get passed this level and you keep coming back as a damn human.

Bikini Bottom Line

I know why you wanna hate me!

I know you don´t want to hear this!
I know you want to believe your facts

All the tension in the world today
All the little girls fillin' up the world today
With the good comes the bad, the bad comes the good

Does anybody really know the secret
Or the combination for this life and where to keep it?
It's kinda sad when you don't know the meanin'
But everything happens for a reason

Now I never thought of Fred as a smartie pants but after taking a look around these lyrics I might have been wrong.

There is a reason why prices go up and why we pay taxes, your current quality of life has been built on the billions paying taxes before you even had learned how to complain.

Thank goodness you made it till the end Pees, Love and I am out of here!

*** ##### *Personal Story With A Soundtrack* You just read the latest chapter in my Personal Story With A Soundtrack series.

Some earlier Personal Stories:

ALL ART by MyI & AI unless watermarked or sourced

Personal Story with A Soundtrack - Take A Look Around - Stop Crying About Prices & Taxes