President Me (38 page)

The bottom line is these kids hate the rich because they're envious. This is a fairly new and seriously disturbing trend. Since the birth of this nation there has always been some ethnic group, family, or organization that had more than the other people in the town. It used to be that we'd look up at those people and think, “Look at him. He lives in a big house up on the hill, drives a Duesenberg, and he wears a fur coat, top hat, and monocle. Maybe if I work hard and study, one day I'll have what he has.” It wasn't envy, it was admiration. That's what society was until the 1970s when the Free to Be You and Me generation was born. Now the line of thinking has become, “That guy's got a big house up on the hill. Why does he need a house that big? Why is it fair that he can have a house on the hill while I have to live in a shitty apartment?” It shifted from “I want to be like to him” to “I resent him, he shamed me.”

And there's going to be a lot more of it because “progressive” politicians continue to fuel this fire.

I've had enough of the congressmen and pundits on the left talking about how the rich aren't paying their “fair share” because of loopholes. They're not loopholes, they're deductions. You created a system, I'm just using an accountant to navigate that system. That, and calling people who make more than $200,000 “wealthy.” This is a code word to piss off people who don't make that much, and incite class warfare.

That's how these politicians get reelected. They stir up envy and resentment and then claim to be the ones who can make that go away.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said, “People feel like the system is rigged against them. And you know what? They're right. The system is rigged.”

This is a horrible message. When you are told the system is rigged against you—whether it's chess, football, or life—you give up. She was essentially encouraging people to curl up and die.

How about this message, Liz? You were born in 1949 in Oklahoma to a janitor. You went on to become a Harvard Law professor and now you're a senator. Sounds like you did just fine in our rigged system. How did you do it? You worked in a restaurant, went to school, cracked a lot of fucking books, burned a lot of midnight oil, and pulled yourself up. That's the message. Stop telling people the system is rigged and that the deck is stacked against them. Tell them to forget the deck and focus on themselves.

But you won't convey that message because if you tell your constituency to actually do something for themselves, they won't elect you to do it for them. You have to keep preaching how the system is rigged and that they'll never get a fair shot so they'll elect you to unrig it. That's how your party stays in power, a perpetual-motion machine of hopelessness.

And then they bring race into it. There was an episode of
60 Minutes
in 2013 that exposed representatives and senators abusing campaign funds to enrich themselves. A representative from California named Grace Napolitano got nailed by Steve Kroft for loaning her own campaign a couple hundred grand at 18 percent interest. She had the audacity to claim that she needed to do this because she could not get a loan for her campaign from a bank because she was Hispanic and a woman. Yes, because there is nothing a bank hates more than loaning money to someone with a couple hundred grand in equity who is a congresswoman.

This type of comment always brings me to my favorite question—stupid or liar? In this case I'm going with liar. This is just a line you're feeding your constituents so they remain hopeless and helpless. That way you can come in as the nonwhite knight and claim to protect them when in fact you're filling your pockets with their contributions and not doing shit for them. Keep shoveling this bullshit so it just becomes their mentality and then becomes their excuse for not doing anything with their life. I didn't get that job because I'm Hispanic and a woman. That drunk driver hit me because I'm Hispanic and a woman. Fall turned to winter because I'm Hispanic and a woman. The only one who can help me has to be Hispanic and a woman.

This outlook is what creates all the corrupt preachers, activists, and community organizers who parasitically feed off the people they claim to help. Why would the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world ever do anything to help their brethren? If they did that, they'd be out of a gig.

And let me say this quickly about “community organizers.” We sing the praises of “community,” but why is it the more that word appears in your life the worse off you are? If you go to a community clinic, community college, or are represented by a community organizer, you're in tough shape. The only time you want the word “community” to describe part of your lifestyle is when it has the word “gated” in front of it.

These people are always telling their “community,” a.k.a. the people they want money from, that we live in a racist society full of so-called white privilege. First off, we have a black president, how racist can we be? Obama was elected twice; he didn't climb down the chimney of the White House and squat the Oval Office.

Not everything is about race. There was a study that showed that yes, when it came to receiving bank loans, white people did get more than black people. That means the bank is racist, right? Well, guess who got more loans that white people? Asians. The bank doesn't give a shit what your skin color is, they're just looking at FICO scores and the Asians are kicking whitey's ass. The bank is not a dude with a hood on a horse, it's an organization that assesses risk and lends money based on analysis.

And as far as “white privilege,” speaking as a honky, I got none. In fact, if I had been black or Hispanic I might have done better. I might have gotten a scholarship and gone to college, I might have gotten that firefighter job I applied for, I might have gotten a leg up from one of the Democrats trying to “level the playing field.” I might have had a bigger penis too. But anyway . . .

The fact is the playing field is never going to be level. It's mathematically impossible to create this. You're born in a certain class, of a certain race, to certain parents, at a certain time in history. This could be good or bad. It's not the government's job to level the playing field, it's your job to get yourself up, or get your kids up, to the next level. Some chicks are born with an A-cup and some with a D. The one with the D is more likely to get the job as the steakhouse hostess. Should the government go around collecting money from all the D-cups to get the chicks with A-cups a tit job? (By the way, a level playing field is a pretty good way to describe a flat-chested woman. “She's got a pretty face but the playing field is level.”)

I'm just saying, don't sit around and hope some politician will level the field. If the field is tilted, just climb harder, bitch.

That's why as president, I vow I will NOT raise the minimum wage.

What the left doesn't understand is that yes, as Gordon Gekko said, greed is good. Greed is motivation. We can pretend that there's no such thing as human nature and that we're all not just shaved apes competing for resources, but that's ignorance.

It's built into us. Just like male sexuality. If you try to stem that tide, you're going to fail. Can the male libido be bad? Yes. While it has the potential for abuse, on the whole it serves a purpose. Same with greed. You need forces to contain and shape it, but you'll never get rid of it.

So why not accept that the human desire for more money can be harnessed for good? We had a massive construction project here in L.A. to tear down a bridge and build a new one over the 405 Freeway. This meant shutting down an eleven-mile stretch of the main artery through the city. This was going to cause such havoc with traffic the local press began calling it Carmageddon. Kiewit, the construction firm that was hired to do the job, were told they would receive bonus money for completion before the deadline and penalties of $72,000 for any delays past it. Well, surprise fucking surprise, they finished eighteen hours ahead of schedule, earning an extra $300,000. They were motivated to work harder and more efficiently to earn more money. Greed was good.

That's why I went nuts during the 2013 State of the Union when President Obama said, “Today a worker making minimum wage makes $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we put in place a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line.”

First off, what is someone making minimum wage doing having two kids? That job is not supposed to be for adults supporting children. Those jobs are for children. And the reason they pay shit is because you can easily be replaced. Anyone can do that job. You are not a commodity. Anna Nicole Smith's corpse could perform that task.

You're not supposed to make a career of working the fryolator. You're supposed to get an education and find a better job and climb up the ladder. If we put a nice comfy beanbag chair on that lowest rung of the ladder, what's to motivate you to keep climbing? This would be like saying we're going to hollow out barbells to make them easier to lift.

I worked at McDonald's and made $2.43 an hour. If I had made ten dollars an hour, instead of talking about the value of hard work in my third book I'd be talking about the value menu over my shoulder. I'd still be there.

The minimum wage is not supposed to be comfortable. People always ask me why I got into comedy. It's because I was in construction. I spent my days toiling in the San Fernando Valley with stucco dust clinging to me because I was soaked in sweat. I came home looking like a white car after a brush fire. I wanted better. Discomfort is what this country was built on. Our granddads were uncomfortable in factories and coal mines and wanted better for their kids, so they worked their asses off to send them to college. The fucking Pilgrims were uncomfortable in wherever they were in Europe, so they sailed over here on the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
. (Okay, history's not my strong suit, but you get the point.) You don't want to hunker down and call it a life.

All this social welfare stuff seems progressive and well intentioned, but doesn't foresee the crippling consequences. Whether it's welfare, disability, food stamps, or raising the minimum wage, we're removing the motivating factor of being poor and miserable. I always compare it to rent control. I have a couple friends who rented nice places near the beach in Santa Monica when they were in their twenties, have rent control, and now are in their forties still living in the same two-bedroom with a cat and no kids because they don't have the space. And they'll never leave. These people will never be homeowners because their rent has been artificially lowered, thus removing the motivation. If their monthly check to the landlord were the same as a mortgage payment, they'd want to buy a house, get some equity, and not have to get the all clear from an Armenian dickhead when they wanted to paint a room. But when the rent is half of what the free market would dictate, that means you're never moving out.

Ultimately success is all about motivation, internalization, and delayed gratification. I break this down into three easy-to-remember phrases.

1. DON'T DO IT FOR ME, DO IT FOR YOU.

Some people are hard workers—when they think the boss is looking over their shoulder. But the people who really go on to success are the ones who work like that all the time.

An example of this is when I have Artie Lange on the podcast. The guy always brings it. Are we paying him to be on the podcast? No. Am I his boss? No. Could he get away with half-assing it? Sure. But he doesn't. He brings his A game every time, much like David Alan Grier, Dana Gould, Jo Koy, Jay Mohr, Alonzo Bodden, and many other repeat guests. And consequently that's why they're repeat guests. They know if they do well on the show they move tickets for their own shows or sell CDs or get more clicks to their website or more Twitter followers to sell their wares to. So they show up.