1 year ago

The Truth About Income Inequality
| Myron Golden |

0:00 The Talk on Income Inequality
Hello, my friend Myron Golden here and I wanna talk to you about something that's really been talked about a lot on the news, and that is income inequality, which is really a funny term when you think about it. And I don't mean funny, haha. I mean just funny peculiar. Income Inequality. I want you to think about how ridiculous the term is, and then I wanna show you how to, quote, solve the ridiculousness of "income inequality" in your life.

So, when you think of income inequality, they talk about income. Politicians talk about income. You know, we're coming up on an election year, so everybody wants to have these issues they want to talk about, but income doesn't exist in a vacuum. And I think that's the first thing we have to understand is that income doesn't exist in a vacuum, and income is an effect of something. It's not a cause. People act like it's a cause. And I think one of the biggest problems in our society today is people get causes confused with effects, and effect confused with causes.

0:53 Income In Relation To Value
But income is the result of something. Income is not just something that happens because the government says, okay, I dub you with more. But income is the result of value. The reason we have income inequality is because we have value added inequality. So, you say, "Myron, what do you mean value added inequality?" Well, income. Income is the result of creating value for other people. And if you don't create value for other people, then you don't get to have an income. If you create a little bit of value, then you get to have a little bit of income, and if you create a lot of value, then you get to create a lot of income.

Now, I know people would argue that people who start companies or people who are CEOs of companies, they don't create as much value as the person actually doing the work. But actually they do create more value than the person doing the work because they're the one who created the opportunity for the person to do the work in the first place.

2:02 Add Value To Increase Income
So, you have to understand that things aren't always as they seem, and I'm here to let you know that any individual can increase their income by increasing the value that they add to other people's lives or that they add into the marketplace.

You know, we live in a free market society here in the United States of America, and in a free market society, you can add as much value as you'd like to. Who would've thought a couple of years ago that a couple of guys who said, "Well, we're gonna allow you to put video on the internet, so that people can watch you. We're gonna create a television station or a channel, if you will, a television station on the internet where everybody can have their own channel. Who would've thought that those guys, when they came up with that idea back in 2006, that within a few short years, their company would be bought by Google for $1.6 billion. Why did that happen? They took something that was missing in the marketplace. They created some value there. They created a lot of value for a lot of people because apparently a lot of people wanted to get their message out, whether their message was a song they wanted to sing, a lesson they wanted to teach or whether they wanted to show somebody that they could do something, that was value that was added, and that value that they added, added to their income.

One of the things that I believe that everybody who is poor, and by the way, I can talk to poor people 'cause I used to be poor. I used to be pitiful poor. You say Myron, "What's pitiful poor?" That's when you're so poor, that poor people feel sorry for you. I used to be so poor that it was really hard for me to figure out which bill I was gonna pay.

3:19 Poverty Is Not Static
One of the problems with the way politicians talk about poverty is they talk about poverty as if it is stagnant. They talk about financial status as if it is somehow static. Whatever financial situation you're born into, you have to be in that financial situation your entire life. No, I was born the second of seven brothers to hardworking poor parents who taught us the value of work, and they taught us the value of learning, and they taught us the value of treating people good. And as a direct result of that, my life and my six brothers lives, we were able to create a better experience of life than our parents. Our parents were able to create a better experience of life than their parents, and our children are already on the path to creating a better experience of life than we were able to do. Why? Because it's all about adding value.