• Kiyosaki flags “I can’t afford it” and “I’ll try” as phrases that keep people poor

• Kiyosaki made the argument in an X post dated September 24, 2026

• Analysis of leaked IRS data put Buffett’s true tax rate at 0.1% for 2014-2018

Kiyosaki’s Words Become You Argument

Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Poor Dad author who says he has held Bitcoin since 2012, believes the biggest difference between rich and poor people is audible in ordinary conversation. In a September 24 post on X, he singled out three expressions — “I can’t afford it,” “I’ll try” and “the rich are greedy” — as the phrases that, in his view, keep people poor. The post sets up a deliberate contrast: “Your BEST ASSETS are FREE,” he wrote, “unfortunately so are your WORST LIABILITIES.” Reaching back to a Sunday-school lesson — “And the word became flesh... and dwelt amongst us” — he lands on the claim that anchors his entire personal-finance philosophy: your words become you.

Read plainly, the argument is about repetition and identity. Each of the three phrases, Kiyosaki contends, encodes a resignation — to unaffordability, to half-effort, to resentment of wealth — and repeating them daily hardens a scarcity mindset into a self-fulfilling position. The rich, in his framing, talk in terms of assets, obligations and cash flow; the poor talk in terms of limits. The claim is also less mystical than it first sounds. Stripped of the scripture, Kiyosaki’s central point is diagnostic: the way a person talks about money reveals how they expect money to work for them. That habit of treating casual language as a balance-sheet reading is the same lens he has applied for years when urging audiences to stop thinking like employees — and it is why his vocabulary advice keeps resonating with a crypto audience built on asset ownership rather than wage dependence.

From Buffett’s Tax Rate to His Own Holdings

Kiyosaki’s language argument connects directly to a structure he has taught for decades: the three types of income. Earned income — wages — carries the heaviest tax burden. Portfolio income, generated from investments such as retirement accounts, sits in the middle. Passive income, the category he favors, can sometimes receive far lighter tax treatment; in crypto, a yield-bearing stablecoin is one modern attempt to manufacture exactly that category for ordinary holders.

The distinction explains his favorite example: Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway chief has famously paid a lower effective tax rate than his own secretary in some years, because most of his wealth derives from investments rather than salary. One analysis of leaked IRS data pushed the logic to its extreme, estimating Buffett’s so-called true tax rate at just 0.1% between 2014 and 2018 — a figure that remains contested because unrealized investment gains, the engine behind the estimate, are generally not treated as taxable income. Buffett is, in effect, the archetype of what crypto would call a whale: an accumulation so large that its tax geometry differs structurally from a wage earner’s. Kiyosaki’s own balance sheet follows the same doctrine. He says he has owned gold since 1971, silver since 1965, Bitcoin since 2012 and, more recently, Ethereum. His price forecasts draw attention every cycle, and several of his targets for 2026 sit well away from current levels — a gap that would take something close to a fresh bull market to close. But the holdings, not the forecasts, are the point of the lesson.

A Mindset Pitch, Not a Market Call

In COINOTAG’s reading, the two threads — vocabulary and ownership — form a single arc: Kiyosaki treats poverty as a language problem and wealth as an asset problem, the same thesis that carried him from gold in 1971 to Bitcoin in 2012. With Bitcoin (BTC) changing hands near $84,400 at press time, several of his stated 2026 targets remain distant, and his warning against leaning on cash lands as policy debate over a Central Bank Digital Currency intensifies. The durable signal is the mindset audit, not any price call.