We often hear politicians talk about taxing the rich. But what invisible tax do politicians use to tax THE POOR and MIDDLE CLASS? In this episode, Chris Miles reveals the hidden tax that the government has been using to increase its spending, creating the next financial crisis. The good news? Chris will share how you can beat it. Learn how by tuning in to the Money Ripples!
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The Invisible Tax
This show is for you, those of you that work so hard for your money. You want your money to start working harder for yourself. You want that freedom of cashflow now, not 30 or 40 billion years from now, so you can live that life that you love doing what you love. Most importantly, it’s not about living without getting rich. It’s about living a rich life. It’s about creating that ripple effect through the lives of others because as you’re blessed financially, you have a greater capacity to do that.
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I want to talk about this invisible tax, a tax that the government’s put on you that, although you’re aware of it, you don’t realize how bad it is. In fact, this is the tax that politicians don’t care about. When it comes to the poor and the needy, this is the one that hurts the poor and the needy the most. This is the tax that affects everybody, especially if you’re poor and middle class, in the lower middle classes, you’re affected the most. You get taxed the most. No matter what comes out of their mouth, they’re all telling you BS because the truth is this tax is the worst of them all.
Which one is it? It’s not income tax. It’s not even your death tax. It’s inflation. I know the topic of inflation has been talked about a lot lately. Even I’ve brought it up on a few episodes as well, but I want to really get into inflation. If we go back to what Rabbi Daniel Lapin said, he said, “Inflation is just evidence of corrupt government, government being corrupt, throwing money at you, throwing money at everybody, then that money circulates.”
It’s true. When you have more money circulating, it does improve the economy without people printing money. The fact that people are exchanging money with one another, exchange between two people create wealth. That’s a good thing. What happens, however, is that between the Feds, which are a bunch of bankers, if you come down to it, the Feds are not government officials. They are bankers. They work and operate and own banks. Big banks, by the way.
You then got the government where they work hand in hand, even though they’re supposed to be separate entities and not supposed to influence each other, the truth is we know that’s different because even the government helps appoint who’s going to be the Fed’s president. These are appointed individuals in these positions. They’re really jobs.
There is a little bit of pressure going back and forth. We saw and heard the Fed say, “Inflation is out of control. We need to raise rates,” but what they haven’t said is, “Inflation is out of control because we decided to print a crapload of money more than we ever have in history. We lowered rates, making it easier for people to create and spend and essentially, drive up prices.”
The problem with that is that it sounds great. It sounds like it’s helping our economy, especially after COVID, but the truth is, they were tightening on money before COVID. From 2018 going to 2019, they were tightening on money and they were even starting to drop interest rates because they were seeing a coming recession. Conveniently enough, COVID came into that play between that and everything else in the world. The next thing you know, we’re delaying, postponing, creating a much bigger bubble. I’m trying to remember what I had called it.
I know some people called the everything bubble. I call it the income bubble or I can’t remember what it was now, cash bubble. Essentially, it was creating a big amount of cash that was going around. People didn’t know what to do with the cash. People were getting payments. They were getting either their tax credits early for their children or paid money in general and even getting forgiveness for student loans, rent, and everything else.
All this was playing out, giving people more cash to be able to spend and drive up prices. You can blame the consumer for this. You can blame the American for this, but the truth is, it’s because the government loves inflation. If they can keep rates down while inflation goes crazy, that’s good for them. The truth is the government doesn’t want to pay down their debt at all. Unlike most people who say, “My goal is to pay down my debt,” the US government, even though they give lip service to it, never want to pay off their debt.
Government loves inflation. Because if they can keep rates down while inflation goes crazy, that's good for them. Click To TweetThey don’t have to. As long as someone’s willing to invest in our bonds, which now looks pretty enticing because we’re the first ones that start raising rates. We are like the bank that has the better interest rate compared to the other banks out there, AKA other countries. People are still buying our bonds. As long as people are buying our bonds and investing in US bonds, which are supposed to be solid and secure, they can keep raising and spending and printing more money.
That is the invisible tax that we’re all dealing with now. Most importantly, that is hurting the poor and middle class. I want to bring up another subject, an ancillary subject, about minimum wage. There are two different schools of thought. You get the more liberals that will say, “Minimum wage is necessary. It’s not fair. In fact, we should raise the minimum wage.” In fact, that’s what we heard in the last couple of years, wasn’t it?
Inflation’s going up, we need to raise the minimum wage because people can’t live on that. Interesting statistic, when I looked it up, only about 1% of Americans are paid at the minimum, but they sure make it sound like the entire poor class is paid at minimum wage, don’t they? If they raise it, that does mean that some of those people that were over minimum wage might get bumped up a little bit. For the most part, people aren’t affected by it.
Most companies have learned something that I’ve also learned, both as an employee, although I thought of it differently as an employee and as an employer. As an employee, I was more of that liberal person. I was thinking, “I deserve this. I need more money.” I have that entitlement mentality, which does not work in real life. It does not work in getting you paid more money.
I thought I was entitled to more because I used to work for minimum wage. I thought it would be great if they forced it higher because those companies were exploiting my labors. I was a hard worker and that wasn’t necessarily a why. I was a hard worker. I sometimes work harder than my coworkers and that made me angry. Why? It’s because they were also getting minimum wage.
What I didn’t understand is that there is a key thing here. It’s that dollars follow value. The more value you create for somebody, the more you get paid. I eventually did get hired away by another competing company that said, “We’ll pay you more if you come work for us and help us start our company.” This company was a pizza restaurant. That’s what I was doing. I was working in a retail business. I was at a pizza family, mom-and-pop restaurant and I got hired by another one.
I was used to minimum wage. I got paid to clean toilets and bathrooms in college. When I was in college, I cleaned up all that junk, minimum wage. I got paid a little bit over minimum wage but not much more, but it was fine. It wasn’t great, but it was okay. Why did I get paid that much? It’s because that’s what I was willing to accept. I was willing to accept less because I valued myself and my time less.
The truth is you never accept a wage unless you believe your time is worth less than the money you accept. You think that money is worth more than the time you’re exchanging. I’ll tell you now, two of my kids will work at a grocery store and now making $12 an hour. I thought that was incredible. When I was working in high school, I was getting paid the minimum wage of $4.75 an hour. Now they’re making $12.
Never accept a wage unless you believe your time is worth less than the money you accept. Click To TweetThey’re making more than the minimum wage here in Utah. Why? It’s because employers figured out they can’t pay minimum wage and they get employees, so they got to pay more to them. That’s a whole conversation right there because, obviously, people are willing to accept minimum wage, which is why 1% of people get paid it.
By the way, just so you know, the majority of those people are between the ages of 15 and 24. They get paid minimum wage. Secondly, though, is that I personally will never work for $12 an hour. I don’t think it’s worth it, but it’s not worth my time to work for $12 an hour. I think my time’s worth over $1,000 an hour. That’s what I demand. As a result, that’s what I accept. I will never take $12 an hour. Now someone says, “Chris, will you work for me for $12 an hour?” “No.” “$15?” “No.” “$20?” “No.” “$100?” “No. Keep going. You got to get up there.”
This is the only way if you want to raise. You don’t even need a minimum wage. I understand that minimum wage had good intentions in the beginning. It helps especially women and children who were being exploited back in the late 1800s into the early 1900s. They were being exploited. They had to find some way to boost that up. In truth, the minimum wage is a joke. It’s something that makes politicians sound like they care when it only affects 1% or 2% of the population. It’s not affecting anything, is it? It’s just making them sound better.
Truth is though that minimum wage in those sectors in food and in retail has driven our prices up. It has affected inflation. Not completely. I don’t blame all inflation on that. Someone says, “Minimum wage is going to drive up inflation if they raise minimum wages.” A little bit. Not totally. Only in a little bit of certain sectors. For the most part, it doesn’t do squat.
It’s a little bit but not as much as what the government and the Feds have done together because, again, the Feds and the government are in bed together whether you like it or not. They’re telling you, “We need to raise rates. We need to print more money,” so you can spend more of it. Got it. Thanks. That’s awesome. Why don’t you raise our tax while you’re at it?
You don’t want to raise our taxes because that’s not great for votes, is it now? What’s the alternative? We can’t raise taxes to raise money to help pay, at least to keep the money going a little bit longer and not creating massive out-of-control inflation. If we don’t raise taxes, what do we do? I have an idea. We keep printing more money, drive up inflation because then, we can keep spending more money.
That’s how they do it. If they can’t get you with taxes, which they’re going to try to do, too, they’re going to try to get you on the other side. Watch out for that invisible tax. Don’t believe when the government, especially anything the government and the Feds say usually is wrong. That’s like when the Feds say that we were not in a recession back in January 2008 when we were already in a recession.
They were saying the same thing, saying inflation was transitory and all of us laughed because any of us that knew what goes on just looked at it. Its common sense. I would say, “Whatever, guys. This is not transitory. This is not because of supply shortages. You guys printed a crapload of money and that has driven up prices.” The shortages didn’t make it any easier.
Either the Feds are stupid or they’d lie to you. I believe the latter. I know I’m being bold and blunt about this and maybe that’s not great. I know some of you guys will say, “Chris, in truth, it comes to this and this and the economics.” I don’t care. The truth is I’m right. This is the truth. There’s a good point in economics. I know there are always exceptions. That’s why I try to acknowledge all of those but the truth is, I can’t do a 100-hour episode and address every exception to the rule.
I’m going down what you need to do now. How do you fight inflation? That is what I want to talk about. How do we fight this invisible tax? It comes right back to what I was saying before about minimum wage. Tying that back in is that you need to improve the amount of income you create. The best thing you can do in an inflation environment is to develop better skills and develop the ability to create more value in people’s lives.
I know you’ve heard me say this many times, but it’s true. If you’re a business owner, keep finding ways to create more value. Create more value and leverage in your business. If you’re an employee, find ways to keep creating more value for your employer. Not from a place of entitlement saying, “They owe me a raise.”
Go to your employer now and ask them and say, “What would it take for me to merit or earn a raise from you? What can I do to create value for the company? What can I do to create value for you as my boss? How can I serve you? How can I solve any problems in this company that would merit me a raise?” They may not give you a raise. They might say, “Here’s some additional work we can give you and maybe we’ll pay you extra consulting labor on the side,” or something like that. There might be additional ways to make an income that’s not raising your salary. It might be an additional stream of income within that business, within that job.
There are a lot of different ways you can do it, but that’s the key. It’s not coming from an entitlement mentality because that doesn’t work. In our company, if they have an entitlement mentality, we don’t hire them plain and simple. We don’t want spoiled brats. We want people that are genuine, authentic, always willing to progress and grow and always willingly create value and have that servant heart so that they do earn more money.
I know some of our employees and contractors now are saying, “I’m going to hold you this. I’m going to play for you this recording when I’m asking for more money.” Keep saying, “Here’s how we create more value for you,” and helping Money Ripples become the powerhouse that it needs to become to bless more lives.
That’s my answer to you. Same for you, if you don’t work for Money Ripples, it’s the same. It’s how you create more value in your position, work, and business to help more people. The truth is, if you want to bless and prosper any economy in the world now, it always comes back to human labor and production. That is the key.
It always comes back to our production. This is also what almost helped us out of a recession after 9/11. We were already going to recession with 9/11. What helped us out was the fact that, unfortunately, a couple of planes flying to some towers to get people banding together and then saying, “I’m going to fight back. I’m going to fight this. I’m going to do something more.” I can’t think of a time, at least in my generation, of Generation Xers, where I felt more unified as a country. We said, “Let’s fight back.”
Whatever conspiracies are out there that may or may not be true, that’s irrelevant. What was amazing about this was how everybody banded together and said, “Let’s fight this,” with one voice. More so than something stupid like a virus. Something stupid like that and then vaccinations, all other junk that’s out there. That didn’t band people together because it wasn’t legit. It didn’t have any real merit, but binding people together to say, “We need to be unified. We need to build back better,” that was something worth fighting for.
That helped pull us up by our bootstraps and get us out of our own rat race, our own pride, our own believing that we were invincible and got us to be more humble and come from a place of banding together and stop bickering and fighting as much and move forward together. That right there, that production, that ability to continue to keep contributing and creating value, that is what helped turn the country around. That is also the same thing that can turn your life around, turn your finances around and help you prosper no matter what’s going on outside of you. No matter what the inflation rent is. You need to find ways to keep serving, contributing, solving problems and adding more value so that you get paid more.
That is the answer to fighting this inflation. This invisible tax that we’re all experiencing now. It doesn’t matter about the investments as much, although those help. We have great investments that fight inflation too. Even infinite banking benefits from inflation when they raise rates, but the ultimate thing that’s going to make you the most money out of anything I can give you is finding ways to serve and create value and solve problems so that money is an inevitable result of that cause. Go and make it a prosperous and wonderful week. I’ll see you later.