Epstein Was Not Unique - Just Another Western Degenerate With Money

Okay. So let's talk about this Epstein this Epstein business. We were talking about it in the Middle Nation discussion group the other day on Telegram, the Telegram group. Because this information, this files and the emails and whatnot got released, And I've been going through them, not deeply, but I've been perusing it enough to realize that the picture that those that that information gives you really is not matching the story that we've been getting. I mean, you should start with that.

Think about the think about how difficult it is for any of us now. How difficult it is for any of us now to actually look objectively at Epstein outside the narrative that the media has been relentlessly pushing. You know? Mainstream media plus all the things that are swirling around in social media. It's almost impossible.

It's almost impossible for you to think about Jeffrey Epstein except through that narrative. The interpretation has already been implanted before the information. So now the information itself cannot even be processed without first being preemptively interpreted in your mind. You know? It's like I always remember Ahmed Deded said, he was talking about the bible and he said about the bible that if you read the bible without theology, you know, if you read just the gospels, just the actual words on the page in that book, then there's no way that you're gonna come out of that thinking that Jesus is the son of god or that Jesus is God or what have you.

If you just read the words, just read the words in the gospels without the theological preemptive interpretation already in your head programming how you will read the words, how you will in in interpret the words. If you just read the words, then there's you're not gonna come out of that with any notion of trinity whatsoever. So that is with Epstein, they've already primed us with a fee prefabricated interpretations. You know, Epstein was a mastermind. He was this insidious blackmailing mover and shaker and whatnot.

He was a Mossad agent. He was a m I five agent. He was CIA, whatever. He was some sort of an intelligence asset, and he was a puppet master, you know, on and on and on. And obviously, was a sadistic satanic predator.

He was a monster. His whole existence was just to corrupt and to spread evil. And then he would use that against people for political ends to control policy and so forth, puppet master. Okay. So we're given that interpretation before we're given the information.

You understand? So now when we look at the information that has been released, all we do is either auto interpret what we read or else we only scour through the information, through the documents just to confirm what we already think. Because I'll be honest with you, my initial reaction okay. Look. My initial reaction when the Epstein story first broke out, more or less, I was the same as most people.

I thought it's deranged. It's evil. It's disgusting. What have you. But frankly, I didn't really find it compelling enough to look into it.

It didn't fascinate me. So when I started to hear all the theories about Epstein, you know, the whole narrative about Epstein, I was like, okay. It sounds more or less plausible, I suppose. So maybe, you know, maybe that's what was going on. You know?

Maybe he was trying to get compromising in compromising material about rich and powerful people and so forth to use it against them. Maybe he was a Mossad plant. He was an asset. He was a spy, what have you. Because he was he was plugged in at multiple levels, you know, across the society, in academia and finance, politics, tech, science, policy, and so on.

So, okay, he looks like someone, right, who was some sort of a central node in an influence network. You know, someone who had great access and reach and so on. And then, you know, with all the compromising material that he was gathering, okay. Sure. Okay.

So from that, he gains a position as a puppet master, extortion, what have you. That's the narrative. And I didn't really find it interesting enough, to be honest with you, to delve into it at the time. Because it was almost completely hearsay anyway. It was mostly speculation.

These were allegations and whatnot. Since no no no actual information had really been released, so I figured, okay. Yes. That it seems plausible on the face of it. To one degree or another, it's believable.

May as it may be like that. But then you have these drops of information, these files by the DOJ. And, you know, before that, before the big disclosures of the documents, before all that, all across social media, there's been like an inundation of very extreme stories, horrific stories that Sasha Riley interview and so on. You know, sacrificing babies, cannibalism, ritualistic rapes and so forth. You know, children, minors, murder, torture, and all of this.

All of these stories. The narrative really ramped up considerably. It's almost like the the Hitlerization of Epstein's identity. You know? You know how Hitler has just become like another name for absolute evil?

It's just a like a a synonym for absolute evil? The most unspeakable villain imaginable? The archetype of the evil dictator? You know? Every once in a while, or really pretty routinely actually, this is done in a lesser sort of ad hoc basis with other people, lesser figures.

A lot of people do it with Trump. Before Trump, you know, there was the Weinstein, the archetype of the gross male predator in the professional professional sphere. And obviously, they do it all the time with with their official enemies, you know, like with Saddam or with Gaddafi and so forth. They turn him into a it's like a brand name of evil. So Epstein became that.

The brand name of evil. That's Epstein. He's the devil incarnate. No matter what heinously satanic, perverted, horrific thing you can imagine, Epstein did it. He definitely did it.

We've been heavily primed with that. We've been heavily primed with that. And that narrative has been escalating and intensifying for a couple of years now and very intentionally just over the past several months. So then these files get released. Heavily redacted.

Yes. But about it's about 3,000,000 pages or so. And I'm sorry, but going through it, honestly, going through it, and again, not deeply, I admit it, but going through it, I'm just not seeing it. I'm not. I'm not seeing anything like some huge political mastermind.

Not at all. He seems to me to be someone who just stayed relatively well informed, you know, relatively well informed about about what was being said within policy circles and so forth. Probably so he could try and sound smart. Seemed like he belonged in those circles. And obviously, was a degenerate.

He was a pervert. He was obsessed with sex, which also helped him to belong in those circles. Because he was just one among an entire class of people, you know, people with money, people with the money and impunity to be as debauched as they wanted to be. See, that those are the circles he ran in. But, I mean, let's be serious.

This guy is receiving, you know, aggregated Quora posts on politics, newsletters and blogs and stuff like that so that he can sound intelligent at dinner parties most likely. That's how it looks to me. I mean, look, there are actual insiders. There are real insiders, you know, movers and shakers behind the scenes. There really are people like that outside of the public eye, you know.

As I say, behind the scenes, the man who whispers in the ear of the king and what have you. Those people exist. They definitely exist. And believe me, they're not getting Google News alerts in their inbox to know what's happening and to sound informed. They know what's happening because they're making things happen.

They're the ones who are making things happen. No. What I'm seeing from the from the files that have been released from the emails, I'm seeing a guy who desperately wanted to be an insider, wanted to be perceived as an insider. He definitely wanted to be thought of as some sort of a big mind. You know?

He was able to successfully connect himself to a few other grifters in those circles within academia, within policy circles, business, so on, and there's a lot of grifters there. I'm seeing someone who greatly exaggerated his own reach and his own connected status. He would talk about people as if he knew them, name dropping and so forth. And he would fake being an intellectual by just parroting things that he read. Sure, he had some connections.

No doubt. He was rich. How is he not gonna have connections? That gives you access. But that goes for anyone with that kind of money.

He doesn't have special access or special connections that I can see. And, again, his connections seem to be, you know, again, from the emails, from the files, it seems to all be sort of within a or limited within a certain click. And as for any questions about how he got his money, I mean, fraud and faking are just as easily plausible as him being bankrolled by an intelligence agency or anything like that. Most of these people are frauds. Don't you know that?

Don't you know that? That's how most of them get rich. This is not unusual. Elon Musk is a con man, for example. No one really asks how how how Elon Musk suddenly became the richest man in the world.

By fakery, of course. Obviously, by fakery. I mean, look at Larry Fink. Larry Fink is, you know, just some middle class, more or less mediocre guy who now controls the largest private sector power in the world, BlackRock. How?

Well, through networking, through fraud, you know, through conning, and through the ridiculous system of financialization. This kind of thing happens. In fact, this is what mostly happens. You and I are not part of that world. So when we think about money, when we think about wealth, we think in terms of, you know, actual money, our savings, the property that we may that we may own, the deposits from our jobs into our banks.

But money for these people is just numbers on a screen. Do you understand? Numbers on a screen, lines of credit, shares, and so forth. Fake money. It's virtual money.

I mean, the actual real assets of someone like an Elon Musk is gonna only be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, most likely. I mean, we're talking about hard assets, the things that you and I would consider wealth. No. His riches is a combination of shareholdings and debt, numbers on a screen, as the same with Epstein. It's the same with, Epstein and con men and hustlers and fraudsters.

They do it all the time. That's what Epstein was in my opinion. Just a fraudster and a hustler. Just another hustler. An impostor.

A fake rich guy who was able to exist in the stratosphere of other rich people, the stratosphere of unaccountable debauchery, morally and intellectually stunted and living out an adolescent fantasy of what being rich and powerful is supposed to look like. Do you understand? I mean, even buying an island, like I was saying I was saying in our chat, even buying an island in the first place, that's a dumb thing to do. That's something that someone does who just won the lottery or who's a, you know, a one hit wonder, some singer or something. This is what someone does who has balloon money, inflated and empty money.

And that's what most billionaires are in the West. These are not industrialists. They're not builders. They're not manufacturers. They're gaming the financialized system.

No. I don't find anything particularly suspect about how Epstein got his money. That's how he got rich. That's how most of them get that rich. Fakery and deception.

And by favors and whatnot, by connections. And yes, he was plugged into the Jewish community in New York, which no doubt facilitated a lot of opportunities for him. A lot of opportunities and a lot of connections. And you know, just like how they say that you need money to make money and that money makes money. Well, connections make connections.

It's exponential. And, you know, people like this, like an Epstein or like an Elon Musk, for example, because they have no real substance, they have no real developed character, and they got super rich through trickery, through fraud, and through gaming the system. So then they have to choose some field, some area, some pursuit that makes it look like they have some degree of depth or they have some interest or what have you besides just making money. So they pretend like they care about science or they pretend that, like, you know, exploring space or technology or make robots or rockets or whatever. Sometimes they're going to like the entertainment industry or the media sector and so forth.

So Epstein just happened to be that sort of virtual billionaire who had delusions of grandeur about being a political insider. Meanwhile, he basically only read blogs. He read blogs and articles and so forth and he went to conferences and okay, he hung out with those think tank types and he was connected with a few Jewish men in positions of institutional importance in academia and finance and so on. But there's very little evidence of him him actually having any substantial relationships with world leaders. I mean, you can think of, Epstein just like those intellectual imposters who made waves a little while back, a few years ago, with that so called intellectual dark web.

If that Virginia, Jewfrey had not come out about his crimes, Epstein would just be another version of a Eric Weinstein or a Sam Harris or whoever. He'd be on Joe Rogan. Epstein would be on Joe Rogan. The only difference is that those people, those other people, the Sam Harris's and whatnot, they need billionaire patrons whereas Epstein would be a billionaire patron. A billionaire patron who fancies himself to be a political theorist, a strategist, an economist, you know, a big mover and shaker and what have you.

For him being a pimp was just part of the perks of his wealth. You understand? Having women in apartments across New York City, escorts on retainer, hookers on retainer that he could use to entertain his friends. They were amenities that he would offer to his friends and that enhanced his image and enhanced his appeal among his clique. And I don't think that is even slightly unusual for his class.

Well, you could literally swap Epstein with almost anyone else from his class and you're gonna find the exact same story. Just change the names, but the story is gonna be the same. And no, I don't find the blackmail angle convincing either, to be honest. I mean, blackmail to what end? Zionism?

Support for Zionism? They've been supporting that in a bipartisan lockstep for over fifty years. No one needs to blackmail anyone in Washington into supporting Israel. They've been supporting Israel. And how are you gonna how do you blackmail someone anyway?

How do you blackmail someone anyway When if you blackmail them, you're only gonna incriminate your own self if you do blackmail them. It's mutually assured destruction. That doesn't even make sense. You know? Unless you wanna unless unless think you that Epstein was gonna pass the photos and the videos that he had, the incriminating evidence and so forth, over to the Mossad, and then they would do the blackmail.

But that still destroys Epstein because it it this all took place on his island where you committed the crimes. So, no, it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see a need for it. Like I said, the most of these people don't need to even need to be blackmailed. They don't need to be blackmailed.

The only ones who are really if you think about it, the only ones who are really in a position to extort any of these people were the women themselves, You know, if you think about it. And then you have that Virginia, Dufry, talking publicly and testifying about, Epstein in court for like a decade naming names and so forth. There's no Mossad or or CIA or intelligence assassination on her. No private hitman to take her out. And you can see from the emails that Epstein was absolutely besides himself when those stories hit the press.

No. I just don't see it. I just don't see it. This person was not some global power broker. I I don't see that at all.

He was a man who was stuck in adolescence, who found his way into huge amounts of money, and that's not unusual. There's many, many people exactly like him. Many. Look, Epstein did not inject degeneracy and perversion into his social circles, into the circles that he moved in. Now his degeneracy and his perversion just made him relatable in those circles.

So when Donald Trump says that Epstein files are not a big deal, he isn't wrong. Because what Epstein was doing is absolutely completely normal for them. It's completely normal. I mean, do you really think that he's the only one who had hookers on retainer? You think he's the only millionaire or billionaire who's got hookers on retainer that has a a cadre of young women that that that that he can provide as amenities and as a party favors for his friends?

Don't be silly. Don't be naive. I don't know why you would think that. Your rich people come from the same culture you come from. The truth is that most of you are Epstein's just minus the money.

That's a fact. It's like when I was talking about Diddy last time, that when when the Diddy case was going on. This is the lifestyle and this is the behavior that your culture applauds and it endorses, and it teaches you to aspire to. I mean, most people are not gonna go through the Epstein files. Think about this.

They're not going through the Epstein files to try to investigate, you know, the possible architecture of private sector influence that he supposedly operated. They're not looking for that. What are they looking for? They're looking for salacious details about girls and about sex and about sadism and whatnot. Sex parties.

That's what you're doing. Scouring through trying to find the most lurid, the most lecherous, the most depraved information that you can because you have an appetite for that. The truth is you're not outraged, you're stimulated. Your whole culture is obsessed with this kind of thing. And your rich people, like I say, they're no different from you.

They just have money. They just have the money and they have the power to live out what is actually in reality your collective fantasy in the West. And when one or two women who who are victimized, you know, one or two women who are victimized from the multitude of women who were involved, when victims come forward because the fantasy actually has consequences in on real people when you actually live it out in real life. The fantasy has victims. So when the victims come forward, then you express shock and you express outrage, which the if truth be told, is driven more by envy than by anything like a genuine conscience.

And now you get to be the self righteous mob, you know, with your torches and pitchforks storming the palace of the debauched aristocracy whose lives and whose lifestyles you wish you had, but you don't have. And that's what that's what makes you angry. I mean, serious. How many music videos think about this. How many music videos have you seen that are not set in a mansion or by a pool or on an island where you have some male performer who's absolutely submerged in an ocean of scantily clad women who are framed in that video as party favors.

Now, you're hypocrites. You're hypocrites. You approve of that fantasy. You promote that fantasy. And you know perfectly well that the rich can and do live out this fantasy in real life.

And it's all completely approved of and it's all, completely encouraged and aspired to in popular culture because your popular culture is continuously in puberty. I said your popular culture is a teenage boy. No. Epstein came from your culture. Clinton came from your culture.

Musk, Gates, Summers, whoever else. Yes. Everybody knew what Epstein was doing. No question about it. Of course, they knew what he was doing.

They were doing it too, and they still are. None of these people needed Jeffrey Epstein to provide this kind of thing for them. He was just one of their own doing what they all do and living out your collective western degenerate fantasy. That's a fact. I've talked about this before.

We all know you're like this. Everyone in the world knows that you're like this. You can act shocked. You can act disgusted as much as you want, but no one believes you. No one believes you who knows anything at all about your culture, who knows anything at all about your history, and who knows anything at all, from their direct experience of your character.

You were like this in every country. You were like this in every country that you invaded and that you colonized. You were like this on your plantations. Yes. You lived out your fantasy, your Epsteinian fantasy with African women on your plantations.

I said the founding fathers of your country are the original Epstein list. So what are you talking about? You lived out your fantasy in Congo. You lived out your fantasy in Kenya, in, Namibia, in Algeria, in The Philippines, in, Korea, all across Indochina. You lived you lived out that fantasy in Haiti, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

No. You've been Epstein all around the world, and you're Epstein right now. In fact, your whole population you don't wanna hear it, but it's true. Your whole population is either an Epstein, a pre Epstein, or a wannabe Epstein. And that's the most interesting thing about this whole thing to me, to be honest.

This is actually the most interesting thing. The absurd performance of moral outrage. You do it all the time, and you act as if Epstein is unique. And again, it's it's it's just like what you do with Hitler. You know, the brand name of absolute evil is Hitler even though he was absolutely par for the course as a western leader.

Hitler wasn't special and neither was Epstein. They're par for the course. But you have to make these selective villains, you know, these selective villains who are entirely actually in reality run of the mill. But you have to make these selective villains tokens of evil that you can hate precisely so that you can deny how run of the mill they are. You have to prove how good you are by how much you revile them.

You need to prove that these that these people are absolute anomalies, that they're abnormalities, that they're distinctly vile and distinctly repulsive so that you can obscure how common and unremarkable their vileness and their repulsiveness in your society actually is. Even though, like I said, they're they're literally, they're living the lifestyle and engaging in the behaviors that your mainstream popular culture upholds as living the dream. I mean, this is the official aspirational lifestyle goal of your whole society. But now you want us to believe that someone who who is actually living that dream, that collective western perverted degenerate dream is some sort of a freak anomaly and you're horrified by it? And that's probably why you're coming out now with all these other these other really extreme stories, you know, the cannibalism, the murders and so forth.

Because the truth is legally in court, in terms of court testimony, in terms of evidence, as far as I know, there's only about a half a dozen women or so who actually accused Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of abusing them when they were minors. And you don't really think that's bad enough. It's not enough to Hitlerize Epstein over that as a brand name of evil. So you need the satanic rituals. You need the child sacrifices, the eyes wide shut weirdness and sadism and what have you.

You needed to be cinematic because again, what we're talking about here is your appetite. That's what we're talking about. Understand this. You have an appetite for this sickness. That's why you take it to that extreme in your imagination.

You see how it's escalated? It's become a fever dream online, what people are saying. Look. It's useful to actually try to separate this out. Separate it out where you have the the actual chronology of what actually took place, And then you have the response and the aftermath.

You have the spin. You have the damage control. You have the narratives. You have the theories. You have the speculations and so forth.

These are two completely different things. And what actually took place is in reality entirely mundane and common. It's absolutely common. You have a rich man with adolescent obsessions about sex and power and about young girls, and he happens to he happens to have a girlfriend who matches his fetishes, and they go recruiting or coercing someone like Virginia Dufry when she was between 14 and 16 years old and others enticed them into lure them into essentially becoming escorts on retainer. Now Virginia herself stayed for two or three years with Epstein and eventually she realized that it was exploitative and that she had been groomed and whatnot.

And then she pressed charges. This is what happened. That was in like 2009 or so and that led to his conviction in 2009. And but she she spoke about Epstein publicly for years. And then finally, the court documents of that 2009 trial came out, then it it became a story.

It got picked up by the media, and the story to got some traction. And so then at first, had the Republicans. They thought that they could use it against the Democrats because Epstein was a Clinton, funder, and he was a Clinton associate. And he was clearly on the Democrat side of things politically. On the political spectrum, he was on the Democrat side.

And then later, it became something that the Democrats thought that they could use against the Republicans because Trump was also associated with Epstein. You know? Even though it seems pretty clear from the, released emails and files and whatnot that Epstein despised Donald Trump. So then you have the documentaries, you have the reports and whatnot. All of these things come out.

All of these reports, all of these allegations come out, and eventually, Epstein gets arrested. Ghislain Maxwell gets arrested, and then Epstein's life ends in prison while awaiting trial. This is what actually took place. This is what actually happened in the real world in terms of anything that's actually verifiable until now. And again, there's nothing hugely anomalous, nothing hugely bizarre or nefarious relative to the normal behavior of that class of people.

And literally nothing whatsoever about this, nothing about this would have ever raised an eyebrow if Virginia Dufry had not been a minor when she started working with Epstein. I don't think we know exactly how many women over the years were involved with Jeffrey Epstein and with Ghislain Maxwell and so forth in their parties and whatnot, in their New York apartments. Something like a 150 women have been compensated by the Epstein Victims Fund that was set up after his arrest. But we have no idea how many of those women were minors when they were involved with Epstein, if any. But what is clear from the emails is that, as I said, basically, Jeffrey Epstein maintained, several apartments around New York City where he housed women for escort services.

He was a pimp, more or less, and he would arrange for cleaners to go to those apartments every couple of weeks, and he installed Apple TV in those apartments and so on. And, basically, he seems to have had or he seems to have kept sort of a stable of prostitutes apparently under contract as a masseuse or something like that. And I guarantee you that you will find an identical setup being maintained at various scales by rich men across that country, CEOs and so forth. Whether they have a 6 figure income or whether they're a millionaire or whether they're a billionaire, and you're gonna find them across every business and every economic sector in The United States and in Europe. Don't act like he was unique.

Many of your men will do this if they have the financial capability to do this. Or you can say that they will do this, they will do this to whatever extent their finances permit them to do it. Because the truth of the matter is most of your men are teenagers and because your whole culture admires this lifestyle. And this is also something you don't wanna hear, which is that many of your women will participate in this as well. Again, at various scales.

There'll be side chicks. There'll be party favors for rich men. There'll be kept women by rich men, you know, sugar babies and whatnot. Yes, they will do this. They'll and they'll do it willingly, and they'll be glad about it.

That's a fact. They'll take that apartment in New York. They'll take that apartment in New York with a a maid service and an Apple TV. They'll take the private jet trips, the island parties, even if it means that they have to have sex with other rich, powerful men. Because, yes, this is your culture.

They don't mind. That's called hustling. Right? WAP. Right?

Cardi B, Nicki Minaj and what have you? Put me in Chanel. Right? Isn't that what you talk about? Transactional self commodification as a career path.

You applaud that. No. I'm sorry. Jeffrey Epstein was completely unremarkable in The United States Of America, in my opinion. Completely unremarkable.

Common. He is neither more nor less evil or more degenerate or less degenerate than the overwhelming majority of people in that country. He just had the opportunity to live that way because of his wealth. He just had the opportunity. And the only thing that is preventing most Americans from living that same way is their lack of wealth.

Not the presence of virtues and the the the presence of morals. No. They're not virtuous. They're just not rich. And Epstein was absolutely standard issue among the the the elite class, the wealthy class.

And when you try to make it out like Epstein was some sort of an evil super genius, criminal mastermind, satanic monster of unheard of depravity, then my opinion, you are the one who's actually carrying out a cover up because not only was Jeffrey Epstein not some sort of a brainiac. Right? Not only was he, in fact mediocre, a fraudster, and an impostor with only moderate, low to moderate political clout and influence, but the reality is that morally, your country produces Epstein's a dime a dozen. And frankly, it's very bizarre where your fantasies take you. Honestly, it's very strange where your speculations take you.

And says a lot more about you than about whoever you are speculating about. I'm talking about you as a society, not as an individual. Because you're coming up with some really twisted things, some really demonic deranged things that not only do you find very easy to believe to be true, but in reality, you actually want them to be true. And trying to dissect why that's the case, truly should be a a a top priority for you as a society. But again, like I said, in terms of his insider status and his alleged great power machinations, think about this.

In over 7,000 emails between 2013 and 2019, the terms bricks, multipolarity, and de dollarization don't even come up once. His only real connection in The UAE was with Sultan bin Souneim, who's the head of DP World. Yes. He's definitely an important and influential man in Dubai. But he's not a member of the royal family.

He's not a member of the ruling family. You know? He wanted bin Salim to use his influence, Salim's influence, to try to help Epstein meet MBS when MBS visited Washington. And eventually, Epstein was able to get a selfie with MBS, which was very important to him to get. Probably, he only was able to get that because he was pitching some kind of an Islamic cryptocurrency.

But like I said before, he does not appear to have been directly connected to any head of state or communicated directly with any head of state as far as I can see. He likes to name drop them as if he knows them, but there's no there's no indication that he actually did know them. I mean, doesn't even appear to be the case that he knew or met even Netanyahu, which is something that you would think would be in his frequent contacts list. You know? Like I said, he knew Trump because Trump was a businessman.

He knew Clinton because he's a billionaire anyway. He's a billionaire democrat, and he's a funder of the democrats probably the Clinton foundation and whatnot. And like I say, he went to conferences. He made donations to different groups and organizations in academia and so on, which makes him again just an absolutely standard issue rich guy with standard issue rich guy social circles engaging in standard issue rich guy behaviors. And he seemed to be very highly motivated to look like someone who had power and influence and who was an insider.

Well, all of that was mostly perception creation. He was creating perception, not a reality. So, no, I'm sorry. I'm not convinced by the narratives. And I'm not shocked by his behavior, and I'm not and I'm not shocked by his activities.

And I don't think that there's any big psyop going on here. I think this is just America as usual. America as usual. That whole country, that whole culture, that whole so called civilization is an Epstein production factory. And you've got thousands, if not millions of Epstein's operating full throttle across your country right now.

And for most of them, the reality is that the only constraint on how debauched they are and how degenerate they act depends exclusively on how much they can afford.