Wealth & Money Quote by GG Allin

It is hard to hear GG Allin describe a school principal without also hearing the whole punk economy grinding in the background: institutions handing out small, moralizing diagnoses while the outsider quietly cashes checks. “A penny waiting for change” is the kind of guidance-counselor poetry authority figures love: it frames the kid as incomplete, in need of improvement, and positions the principal as the one who gets to decide what “change” means. Allin repeats it the way you’d repeat an insult you plan to wear as a badge.

Then he flips it into pure class-and-status spite. The real offense, he implies, wasn’t his attitude or his prospects; it was the wage gap. That move does two things at once. It punctures the presumed dignity of the educator (the adult, the gatekeeper) and replaces moral authority with the crudest metric in American life: income. In Allin’s telling, the principal’s problem isn’t pedagogy, it’s resentment.

The subtext is less “money equals success” than “authority is personal.” School discipline gets recast as a petty power struggle, a man defending rank. Coming from Allin, whose career was built on provocation and the deliberate sabotaging of respectability, it’s also a self-mythologizing origin story: the system misread him, tried to minimize him, and he proved his value in the only language it couldn’t ignore.

There’s irony here, too: he rejects being evaluated by institutions while bragging in their most institutional currency. That tension is the point - rebellion that still knows exactly where the scoreboard is.