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The Power of an IRA: 

Do me a favor: think of the government as a monstrous pedophile with trillions of dollars worth of weapons at its disposal and a vendetta against you. Scary right? Realistically speaking, if a gigantic child predator with trillions of dollars of weapons were chasing you, you'd probably be scared shitless. But let's say you're the type of guy who doesn't go down without a fight, and with the only weapon you have on your person (let's call it a small pocket knife), you lunge at the monster with all your might. You'd still die, but nobody could say that you died a coward. An IRA is that small pocket knife. 

An IRA is an account set up at a financial institution that allows you to save for retirement with tax-free growth or on a tax-deferred basis. The three main types of IRAs each have different advantages:

Traditional IRA: 

Traditional IRAs are most popular for people who don't have access to a retirement savings plan through their employer (primarily a 401k). You make contributions with money you can deduct on your tax return, and any earnings you make through investing in stocks can grow tax-deferred until you withdraw them later in life. Money saved by the investor is taxed as income once it is withdrawn, usually after retirement. Basically, when you retire, you won't be making shit, so if you withdraw money from this IRA when you're older after investing in low-risk stocks, you will be taxed on it like you're a poor person. While the expressed purpose of a traditional IRA is for retirement savings, life happens, and you may need some of the funds early. You can make penalty-free withdrawals before the age of 59 1⁄2 for qualifying expenses, such as a birth, an adoption, educational expenses, or a first-time home purchase.

Roth IRA: 

With a Roth, you make contributions with money you've already paid taxes on, and your money may potentially grow through the stock market tax-free, with tax-free withdrawals in retirement. Unlike a traditional IRA, a Roth IRA has no lifetime required minimum distribution. You're eligible for tax-free and penalty-free early withdrawals on what you've contributed at any time. But, if you're under the age of 59 1⁄2 and you withdraw EARNINGS on your contributions, you may be subject to taxes and withdrawal penalties on that amount. To put it simply, with a Roth, you only pay taxes on your stock gains.

Rollover IRA:

A rollover IRA allows you to move funds from your previous, employer-sponsored retirement plan (usually a 401k) into an IRA. When you roll over your old retirement account into an IRA, you can preserve the tax-deferred status of your retirement assets without paying current taxes or early withdrawal penalties at the time of transfer. Let's say you get laid off from a good job that matched your 401k at a 50% clip; if you wanted to work as a contract worker after the fact, you'd open up one of these.

One last thing I should mention: you can invest portions of your money into both a Roth IRA and a Traditional IRA.

Besides owning property or contributing to your 401k, investing some of your money into an IRA is your only chance at retiring and having ten good years in Florida before being diagnosed with throat cancer and dying with morphine pumping through your atrophying body. As of today, the government allows you to invest $7,000 a year into IRAs. 

If you started putting $4,000 a year into a Traditional IRA at twenty-five and invested in relatively safe companies, you could waltz into retirement with a nice chunk of change. How much? Well, if everything in your life was average (you made the median household income in the US, your IRA had a return of 7%, ect.), you'd walk away with $726,273 after taxes at sixty-five.

Because the American education system is an absolute disaster, experts say at least two-thirds of this country knows little or nothing at all about IRAs. I've invested thousands of dollars into my Traditional IRA, and while I've had to take out a majority of that because I've moved five times over the past three years, I'm still ahead of the curb simply by having one open. 

Other ways to build wealth beginning in your twenties include investing in real estate investment trusts (known as REITs), buying your own property and praying it will appreciate with the work you put into it, purchasing equities outside of a 401(k) or IRA plan, purchasing ETFs, putting your money into high yield savings accounts, and all kinds of other investment avenues that I’m not qualified to talk about, but I encourage you to research. Having enough discipline to invest is difficult, but doing so has never been easier….I encourage all of you to look into at least one of these investment tools. 

Let's be completely honest here: in this America, half your federal tax money is most likely being used to launder money through wars you don't support and being wasted in the pockets of corrupt goons with bad taste as a result of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about over sixty years ago. The rest of it? Well some of it goes to helping people in need, but a fair amount is mismanaged, goes missing, or is used on things nobody in this country needs. The last thing you should want to do is hand these retards more money years down the road. Invest small, and invest often. This is something I need to get better at, and so do you. 

Just for fun, and justify my frustrations with our dilapidated system, here are some interesting ways that the government spent our tax money in 2023:

• $6 million to promote tourism….in Egypt

• Part of a $2.7 million package went to studying Russian cats walking on treadmills 

• $8,395 went to the Department of Defense so they could get a lobster tank

• Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Smashing Pumpkins, received up to $10 million in grants each

• $3.1 million in grants to Usher

• $9.7 million in grants to Slipknot

• $3.9 million to Melissa Etheridge

• The Department of Defense ruined over $169 million worth of military equipment by leaving it outside where it got damaged by weather

• Every year, the IRS reroutes incoming tax payments to a fund set aside for US presidential campaigns. The account is funded by a $3 IRS tax return check box. Since 2008, no major political party’s candidate for president has accepted the funds. As of November 1, 2023: $400.6 million sat unused in the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Account

• A $3.8 million University of Pennsylvania study is investigating “COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among Black and Rural communities to help identify and combat misinformation” 

• $236 billion in improper payments that either went to the wrong person, was sent to the wrong account, or was paid for the wrong reason

• A $171,000 National Science Foundation study making monkeys gamble

Here’s the thing: I would not care if my money were being used to make healthcare more affordable for young families or help rehabilitate drug users back into society. I have a heart, I donate money when I can, and I believe anyone doing well has a moral responsibility to help those in need. I don’t believe that successful people should be keeping all of their money when our society is as Godless as it is today. If everyone still believed in God, there would be no need for taxes. There would be a healthy amount of inequality, but nobody would be in as perilous a position as those on the streets of New York or San Francisco. It would be a compassionate society of hard workers and upstanding citizens, big beautiful families and happy people. Things wouldn’t be perfect, but they would be damn close. 

That will never happen. Aside from religion waning on the public consciousness, theocratic societies have a long list of their own problems because humans are fundamentally flawed. So instead, our money goes to a highly bureaucratic body of individuals who supposedly look out for our interests, while simultaneously commiting insider trading by using the investment banking accounts of their spouses. 

In the first half of the twentieth century, two wars drove American innovation, and in doing so, stimulated our economy by handing out government contracts. The taxpayers of the West gave America’s best entrepreneurs money to make and improve machinery to help us defeat our enemies. From modern airplanes and power tools to powdered mac and cheese and blood plasma transfusions, the innovations made possible by checks from Uncle Sam and co.made America by far and away the most advanced society on the planet. Like a dog being trained with Oscar Mayer turkey, Republicans noticed that this whole war thing was pretty sweet, and they drove us into more wars so that they, their friends, and investors, could make more money. They learned how to manipulate public consciousness through the media, how to stage the perfect false flag, and how to steer religious figures in their direction. Like any “get rich quick” scheme, they had no real interest in figuring out who was eventually going to foot the bill for the emotional and physical distress experienced by brave troops throughout all of these wars, or national debt taken on – they just kicked the can down the road…. and then started another war. 

Initially, Democrats were against these wars and the domestic intelligence system getting stronger and stronger as a result of them, but like anyone at a bar participating in dry January, they eventually joined the party. Democrats, years removed from fucking each other in mud and doing drugs while effectively protesting, figured out that they could get retards from their coalition fired up by using identity politics and a different kind of propaganda. You see with Republicans, they needed to defeat the Viet Cong to liberate the world from communism. They needed to crush the Iraqis because they hated our freedom. But liberals? Well, they need to defeat Russia and the Middle-East because they hate gay people and because women aren’t allowed many rights. In order to save them, we’re going to have to bomb those women and their young children into oblivion. “Take that, you fucking homophobic piece of shit,” some lady with a sleep apnea machine writes under a Reddit post.  

Now, we have an economy dependent on government contracts and government employees – an economy that uses war like a diabetic uses an insulin patch. Oh, and before I forget to mention: this has created $34 trillion and counting in debt. That debt amounts to $102,838 a person…. you got that laying around? How are we going to get out of that tab? I don’t know, but I can assure you that Republicans won’t want to pay more taxes and Democrats won’t want to give up funding health services and other government programs. So if I had to guess…. probably a new war?

The only hope this country has is far outside of Washington DC. It’s in homes in Iowa and townhouses in Bayonne, and it lives in the populist factions of the left and right. My hope is that through shared understanding, these two groups, who oppose things like war and insider trading in Congress for completely different reasons, can compromise on a future of peace and prosperity. I would love to see a world where respect for the climate and the working man meets respect for business and personal liberty: an America without needless wars, largesse military contracts, nefarious hedge funds, and corrupt Harvard law school grads in Congress.