Shocking Quotes: The Astonishingly Tone-Deaf Comments from the Wealthy Elite
One of my friends is insanely rich and doesn’t really take a no for an answer.
Calls me in the middle of the week (it was Tuesday) and informs me that I am going to Cyprus with him for two weeks, flight is going to be in three days if I agree. Let me inform you that I am a student, I have a part-time job and two cats.
It was really nice of him to take me on a trip, but I can’t since I live a middle class life. Took me one hour to explain to him why I can’t go.
I work at a private school and they give each student their own iPad when they enter pre k and use them all the way up to 6th grade.
One of my fourth graders who had been there since pre k told me that she thought everyone in the world is just given an iPad when they are born.
Friend invited me out to eat. I told her that I couldn’t. That I needed to wait for payday. That I just paid so my bills and didn’t have much left over. Her response was ” wait so you don’t have money, but you work so I don’t understand. Can’t you just get like $100 from your parents?”.
Rishi Sunak – the UK’s finance minister saying mid-covid while millions lost their jobs due to lockdown saying people should “live off their savings” apparently since we haven’t been able to spend money because everything is shut we’ve saved money..
Despite not earning money because everything shut down.
Everyone I work with is middle class & comfortable & they all look down their noses at poor people. I’ve lived in poverty before and had to rely on benefits for a year or two after my Foster mum died so I know what it’s like to have nothing and to have to scrape by on the bare minimum but these guys think it’s all free council houses and nightly takeaways and Primark shopping trips. I get into some heated discussions about it all at work.
Doesn’t exactly answer your question, but there’s this awesome scene I love from the documentary Queen of Versailles. Basically about this rich family building America’s biggest house and showcases their decline as 2008 hit.
In it, they all get really drunk at a Christmas party and the real estate guy starts blabbing about the entire economic situation. Basically about how they were able to get away with financial m****r — the banks duped all those people, their mega businesses profited, they got away with it, and now the country is doing the same exact thing and letting them get away with it all over again. Guy seemed amazed that the system was so easy for them to manipulate if anything.
I don’t think she was rich so much as very comfortably middle class, but my former boss once told me I should just “hire a car” so I could get to work faster and without the worry of contracting COVID on public transport.
I was in my early twenties and she was paying me minimum wage. What on earth made her think a hire car would be in any way economical?
She got very defensive when I politely pointed out it would cost me £600/month (not counting the fuel costs for a 40 mile round trip each day!) and therefore out of my budget.
During the first bit of the pandemic when everyone was baking bread and there was a shortage of yeast, my mum scoffed and said: “what idiots, panicking about yeast! Just put the bowl in the yard under a blooming tree! Honestly, people these days are so out of touch…”
It never once occurred to her that not everyone has a huge yard full of blooming trees.
(We aren’t rich, not even close, but she’s been taken care of her entire life and has never had to work a single day. She still lives in the house she was born in, and is really out of touch with reality.).
Not one or two things, but many. One of my friends comes from an upper middle class background and has confused philosophies. He will never outright say that the poor deserve to suffer, but says that subsidized/public health, education, day care, shelter, food, etc. are what is ruining our nation. This in a country where less than 5% of the population even qualifies to file income tax (file, not pay, only 1.5% actually pays any income tax) and where more than 40% of the population is regarded to be one crisis away from abject poverty and starvation.
There was a guy on a forum I frequented years ago who clearly grew up rich and once said he didn’t have sympathy for anyone who didn’t always have $20k on hand to cover emergency expenses. It’s wild, he genuinely thought that everyone should be able to easily save that much.
Not me, but a friend of mine is a surg tech in a hospital and he once overheard two doctors talking to each other. One was trying to decide if he wanted to buy a Tesla Model X (the most expensive one iirc) and the other doctor already owned two. Trying to sell his colleague on getting one, the Tesla-owning doctor said “they’re so safe! I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t own one!” Completely forgetting that he was talking about a $100k car.
I run a higher end store that sells lighting and ceiling fans, etc.
I once had a customer roll up in her brand new Jaguar F-Pace and get quite upset when we didn’t have multiple of the $2800 lights in stock that she wanted. A simple web search would have told her that we are a showroom and these items are ‘order only’.
