WAG: there’s good money to be made in reading brief lists of examples and assuming they’re exhaustive.
You were one of the lucky few. Most people stay in whatever economic class they are born into; America is one of the less social mobile nations.
And then there are people who work multiple jobs, who don’t have nice vacations or nice cars, who would get fired if they took off “mental health days”. There are the people who work themselves to exhaustion, and only end up poorer every year for their trouble.
You and Cisco are just indulging in the standard right wing sneer that the poor are poor because they are lazy. So, of course, they are vermin who deserve no consideration and no compassion. Not real people, like you are; just cattle to be used.
I hate to break it to ya, but you are not wealthy. Not even close.
What does the word “luck” mean in your example?
In college, I had a friend who got a flat tire; I helped her change it. For months thereafter, I’d see her driving around on the spare. (This was in the good ol’ days, when the spare was actually a real, full-sized tire). I’d ask her occasionally about it; she was always “going to take care of it this week,” or something similar. She had the money to fix or replace a single tire, I know, because she was happily going out Friday and Saturday nights to the local hangouts and drinking Seven-and-sevens - no rail liquor for her.
Then she got another flat, the morning of a final exam, and arrived late, and the professor refused to let her work past the “pencils down” time, and she didn’t finish the exam.
Naturally, this was unfair, because she was unlucky enough to get a flat the morning of an exam, and who can predict when a flat tire comes?
She presumably would have been late if she’d had to change the tire anyway.
I know. I said “comfortable.”
Yet I’m in Obama’s “make 'em pay” target group.
Doubtful. Ten minutes with a jack, vs. waiting for a tow truck.
And color me completely unsurprised that the moral of that story totally escapes you.
You think most women - especially those that require your help - can change a tire in ten minutes? Hell, I can’t change a tire in ten minutes and I’ve done it a dozen times on four or five different vehicles.
There is no moral to your story. There are a dozen different messages you could take from it, all equally valid - leave an hour early for exams, use public transportation, always keep the number of a taxi company handy, sleep with your professors, or make sure you have a properly inflated spare tire at all times.
In any case, you missed the point I made earlier: that people do move up in the world, but statistics show that those who are born up remain up. Should we have different tax brackets for self-made people and trust fund babies? Perhaps, but the point is that most wealthy people have no more right to their wealth than anyone else.
A higher estate tax - coupled with a reduction in income tax, for all I care - would get us closer to the meritocracy we claim to be, but conservatives have been fighting that one for years.
Could I have a cite for this, please?
For the purposes of the discussion, let’s define “rich” as millionaire, and “vast majority” as "more than 60%. Thus we need a cite that more than 60% of all millionaires in the US were born to millionaire parents.
You know, like Barack Obama. 
Regards,
Shodan
I can’t find a cite that specific. Studies of intergenerational income mobility aren’t limited to particular income groupings.
However, try this:
So 55% of the Forbes 400 in 1997 were born millionaires.
On the one hand, I consider myself to be slightly left of center on national fiscal issues, slightly right of center on personal fiscal matters, and a wild-assed liberal on social issues. I’m a member of a racial minority group because although I have one white parent I also have one black parent. I also don’t believe in deities or any other superstition for that matter, so no, I’m no conservative, not by what’s defined as conservative today anyway.
On the other hand, I’m doing pretty well financially; much better than my parents ever did. However, luck had absolutely nothing to do with it. I’ve been working my ass off since I was 16, and worked a full time job while maintaining a full course load all through college. I’ve taken a total of 4 weeks vacation in my entire adulthood and, after 33 years of work, have begun to recognize, and physically feel the effects of, the Sisyphusian futility of constantly reaching for the next achievement and never being satisfied once its attained, prompting yet another set of more difficult to achieve goals, ad infinitum.
Although I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, I, more or less, have the life trappings of someone pushing 50 who, after all considerations, relatively smart financial decisions, and years of personal sacrifice, is able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle with nice toys; nice house, small beach house, small yacht (Four Winns for those who care about such things), 3 cars; one a Porsche, 2 motorcycles, personal trainer, housekeeper, financially and emotionally rewarding career, and a wonderful and devoted wife of what will be 20 years in a few months who I truly don’t deserve.
When conservatives talk about financial restraint, personal responsibility, the pursuit of excellence, etc… I’m right there with them; it’s how I’ve lived my entire life. However, that’s where they and I part company, as I truly believe we each have a responsibility to our fellow man, that when we help others we help ourselves, and that the measure of the best of us is determined by how we treat the worst of us.
F**k you.
In fact, if you look at income mobility in a broader sense (rather than just the multi-millionaires), these statistics are generally broken down into quintiles.
In America, only 36% of the people whose parents were in the top quintile remained in the top quintile. Thus it’s not true that the majority of rich people had rich parents.
Likewise, only about 32% of the people born of parents in the bottom quintile remain in the bottom quintile. So it’s also not true that being born into poverty traps you there.
There have been many studies of the root causes of poverty, and they tend to indicate that it’s behavior, not parental wealth, that’s the biggest driver of personal success.
The path to success in America is pretty straightforward:
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Get an education. You don’t have to go to college, but you need some kind of post-high school education (a trade, tech diploma, whatever)
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Find a spouse, and stay married. Divorce is one of the biggest destroyers of personal income mobility.
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Don’t have children out of wedlock. Single parents have a hell of a time.
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Don’t spend beyond your means. Personal debt is another big destroyer of mobility.
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Save some money. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but consistent savings build wealth.
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Don’t quit your job on a whim. Stable job profiles are a good predictor of mobility.
Unfortunately, if you look at the bottom quintile, you don’t see a lot of that kind of behavior. You see a lot of single mothers, a lot of people without even high school educations, a lot of personal debt, a lot of job abandonment, very little savings.
You can throw as much money at the bottom quintile as you want, but it won’t change the behavior. In fact, it could make it worse by mitigating the pain felt by such behavior - a moral hazard all social programs have.
The key to helping the poor is to figure out whether there are real roadblocks other than their own behavior, and removing them. But again, this is hard to do when so many of the roadblocks are created by those behaviors. Building public housing creates ghettos. School busing was supposed to even out the quality between the inner city schools and others, but it just brought the quality of the other schools down without improving the inner city schools.
Some cities have tried to eliminate the inner city ghetto problem by building public housing or subsidized housing in small groups in the wealthier areas. Studies have shown that the result was simply to spread crime around and lower property values in the areas affected.
The black community in particular has a big problem. Over 70% of black children are born to single mothers. As long as that kind of ratio holds, there’s very little that you’re going to be able to do to lift them out of poverty - something I believe Barack Obama actually agrees with.
Citation needed. And not from The Millionaire Next Door, please.
As a liberal, I also believe that once you have money, it’s a lot easier to make more money, thus an exponential increase in fortune may follow only a slight increase in hard work, talent, or luck.
That’s the biggest reason why I think the rich should be taxed more and bear more responsibility. They have the means already and is much easier for them to acquire wealth than those without the means
The exact numbers depend on the years looked at, and my data is in a file on my computer.
However, here’s a report on mobility between 1995 and 2005 from The U.S. Treasury Department. I trust you’ll accept that source as suitably non-biased?
Major findings:
If you look at table 1 in that report, you’ll see that of the people in the bottom quintile of income in 1996, only 42% of them were still in the bottom quintile in 2005. 58% of them moved up.
Looking at table 3, you can see that of the people in the lowest quintile, almost half of them say their income at least doubled over that ten year period.
So in just ten years, over half of the people in the bottom quintile had moved up as least one quintile. And of the top income group, only 25% of them were still there ten years later.
So when you talk about the ‘increasing income inequality of rich vs poor’, it’s important to realize that ‘the rich’ today is largely a different group of people than it was ten years ago, at least in terms of income. And that it’s not as hard to move out of poverty as the left claims it is.
The conclusion of the report:
I’ve cited this material probably a dozen times on this board, in threads that contain the same participants. Yet each time the subject comes up, I have to cite it again because no one believes it. It’s almost like people ignore or forget data that doesn’t fit their conclusions. Go figure.
The second statement doesn’t follow from the first. Someone who’s gone from making a dollar a day to making two dollars a day has seen his income double, but he’s still in the bottom quintile (and in fact probably in the bottom percentile).
I didn’t say it followed from that. I was making a statement about the results of both tables. Again - 58% of the people in the bottom quintile in 1996 had moved up at least one quintile by 2005.
The importance of the 100% number is that is evidence that the move wasn’t just from the top of one quintile to the bottom of the other.
I was getting that from the word “so” at the beginning of the second statement.