Cerita berikut merupakan kutipan dari buku Robert Kiyosaki yang berisi pesan agar setiap orang hendaknya mengurus diri sendiri bukan berharap pada pemerintah ataupun seseorang yang seperti robin hood.
My poor dad believed strongly in the idea that the government should take care of people from cradle to grave. He loved the story of Robin Hood, a man who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.
My rich dad believed we should take care of ourselves. He didn’t want a government handout. He believed there were too many government workers, public servants who were Robin Hoodlums, only serving themselves and stealing from the people.
As the ripples of this financial crisis spread, the number of public servants who are really Robin Hoodlums is revealed. It’s now dawning on us, the taxpayers, how much our public servants have been Robin Hoodlums serving themselves.
An article in The Week entitled “The Pension Time Bomb” states that the shortfall in government pensions is $3.4 trillion—more than double this year’s federal deficit. Seven states, including Illinois, Connecticut, and Louisiana, are expected to exhaust their pension fund by the end of this decade. More than half the states will be out of money by 2027.
To make matters worse, government pensions take priority over keeping state governments running. This means that pensions are protected and must be paid. Even when a municipality declares bankruptcy, pensions are paid. This means pensioners get paid even if police, firefighters, and schoolteachers don’t get paid. In other words, our retired public servants get paid even if the government goes bankrupt. This is not stealing from the rich—this is stealing from the people they’re supposed to serve.
This makes my blood boil and is a reason why I wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad in the first place. In a few years, the world will realize how greedy and self-serving so many public servants have been. Many aren’t there to serve the people—they’re there to serve themselves. They sought out government jobs not to serve the people but for job security and life-long benefits. Now as our country is going broke, they still get paid.
In Yonkers, New York, taxpayers were outraged to find out that police officers were able to retire in their forties and collect six-figure incomes. For example, former police officer Hugo Tassone retired at age 44 with a $101,333 pension. Edward A. Stolzenberg, a retired hospital administrator in Westchester, New York, collects $222,143 annually. These guys are Robin Hoodlums. They take more than they give. They steal from all of us.
As a child, it angered me to hear teachers and public servants like my poor dad criticize the rich, calling them “greedy.” I always suspected that it was the public servants in government that were the greedy ones. Now, as this crisis reveals just how much our public servants have been feathering their own pockets, I realize my suspicions were true.
The tragedy is that it’s the government workers cheating the system that continue to be protected by it. Since their retirements are protected, it means the taxpayers will continue to pay their feathered retirement nests for life while receiving reduced government services. To make matters worse, now that these excesses are being revealed, it means new government workers will be paid even less, which means lower quality government workers in the future.
There’s an old saying that goes, “Thank God we don’t receive all the government we pay for.” It seems we’ll be paying for government we didn’t receive for years, at least until this current batch of public servants pass on to the big bureaucracy in the sky.
For all supporters of COR, I suggest you learn to take care of yourself and not expect the government to take care of you. This is why in 1973, when I returned from Vietnam, I decided to listen to my rich dad and become an entrepreneur and not my poor dad who suggested I become a government employee like him.
I know we need government employees. I know government workers perform many vital services. I just didn’t want to be one of them. I didn’t want to adopt the attitude of my poor dad, a man who believed the government should take care of him for life. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror knowing I was taking from the very people I was supposed to be serving. This is why I’m an advocate of financial education and learning to take care of yourself so that you don’t have to take from others.
Thank you for supporting COR.
Cerita berikut merupakan kutipan dari buku Robert Kiyosaki yang berisi pesan agar setiap orang hendaknya mengurus diri sendiri bukan berharap pada pemerintah ataupun seseorang yang seperti robin hood.
Robert Kiyosaki