Why are rich people so villified in this country (U.S.)?

2012xxx wrote:

[quote]Smooth Daddy wrote:

[quote]Todd from Texas wrote:

That .01% has @ 50% of the nation's net worth

Are either of these statements actually true? I know the top 0.1% has a disproportionate share but not anywhere close to 50%.

I am not sure. If you figure there are @ 400 billionaires with an average net worth of maybe 6-8 billion, you are looking at 1/100th of .01% of the nation with a net worht of @ $2.5 trillion. I am also pretty sure the net worth of the bottom 160 million or so is $0 given so many in debt. I suspect the top .01% may in fact have 1/2 the nation's net worth

This might make it clearer.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html

They live off of "old money" that has been inherited. This holds true for 89.4% of the "rich".

Todd from Texas wrote:

2012xxx wrote:

[quote]Smooth Daddy wrote:

[quote]Todd from Texas wrote:

That .01% has @ 50% of the nation's net worth

Are either of these statements actually true? I know the top 0.1% has a disproportionate share but not anywhere close to 50%.

I am not sure. ...

This question has been answered:

Todd from Texas wrote:

That .01% has @ 50% of the nation's net worth

"There would seem to be a nontrivial inaccuracy in your statement. According to Mother Jones (a liberal bastion if ever there was one), you would need to include 100 times more people (top 1%) in order to get to just short of 35%.

Care to be a little more sober in your diatribes?"

Now please, try integrity on for size. You might be surprised that you can tolerate it.

The real question is why Republicans feel that only company heads are suffering.

It's not so much about inheritiance as family financial support. Young adults who came from poor families have to take out loans for college living expenses (and sometimes have to work while they go which lengtens the time before they earn the degree), can't afford a car until they have a full-time job, must save to put down just the minimum down-payment on a house, etc. Kids from wealthier families can go to school full-time without worrying about paying for it themselves, often get their first car paid by parents who also often chip in a significant down payment on their first home which also helps them get a lower mortgage payment than if they only put down the min, etc.

But myths - usually the young adults from the wealthier families get to believe that as long as they graduated and are working that they themselves somehow "earned" all they have. You rarely hear one of these people concede that they were lucky.[/quote]

Exactly. The rich kids I went to college with didn't seem to understand this at all. They loved patting themselves on the back for traveling to New Orleans or latin America to build a house for a couple weeks, but they didn't seem to realize that their families' financial situations were drastically different even from people who went to the same elite liberal arts college as them. Some of my friends' parents paid their rent after they graduated so that they could have some unpaid internship that would advance their career and then paid for them to go to law school. They now have zero debt and never had to work at a fast food restaurant or some other menial job in order to pay off student loan debt or other living expenses.

And like you said, they think that they had to work for what they got, when they really just had their life handed to them. All they had to do was show up to class and not totally f things up.

ri@ wrote:

Any ideas? It seems that many people automatically hate someone that is rich. I suspect it's because of jealousy? I bet if the haters were rich, they wouldn't have such a problem with it.

There are givers and there are takers in this world. I have found that the top 1% and the bottom 25% are takers, while the rest of us are the givers.

So what if some people are born luckier? There is no use in hating someone for his good fortune.

Here's something unusual. My friend's family is wealthy but he didn't know that until he was 25 and his trust payments started. His parents did NOT pay for college and no one paid for his rent after graduation. He studied hard and got a EE degree which netted him a good job. It was only at his 25th birthday that his parents told him of his grandfather's trust that paid him $50K a year for the next 25 years. His family was eccentric, to say the least. He had no clue of their wealth. So yes, he was lucky, but do you think he had his life handed to him before this luck kicked in? Stop the jealousy and work your ass off like my friend.

Guy O'Leighken wrote:

I'd say it's basically the same reason it annoys you when you share a dessert with someone and they eat most of it.

When you pay for the dessert you should be able to eat most of it!

racehorse wrote:

There are givers and there are takers in this world. I have found that the top 1% and the bottom 25% are takers, while the rest of us are the givers.

The bottom 25% are a direct product of the activities of the top 1%.

However, the middle 70+% are the ones who subsidise these people.

chingwah wrote:

racehorse wrote:

There are givers and there are takers in this world. I have found that the top 1% and the bottom 25% are takers, while the rest of us are the givers.

The bottom 25% are a direct product of the activities of the top 1%.

However, the middle 70+% are the ones who subsidise these people.

The constant comments on boards like these as well as from politicians about the holiness of the middle class is hilarious.

Yeah, yeah, the middle class are the only truly hard-working, virtuous people, blah, blah, blah. I would think that anyone with a positive IQ would know that the politicians are simply sucking up to them for their votes. But then you seen the same crap repeated by clowns on these boards and I guess a whole lot of the middle class really believes this claptrap.

Humans truly are hilarious creatures - unbelievably vulnerable to flattery both from others and from themselves.

momno wrote:

And like you said, they think that they had to work for what they got, when they really just had their life handed to them. All they had to do was show up to class and not totally f things up.

This is HORRIBLY inaccurate!!!!

I am currently an undergrad, who has "rich" parents (make ~300K year, not really rich, but still the target group that the dems want to go after for taxes for some reason). I am a junior in college and trying to get into medical school so I can be a doctor like my dad.

Do you seriously think this is going to be handed to me? I work as a waiter at a restaurant currently as well.

Trying to get into med school, I still sacrifice many friday and saturday nights studying. I have to earn my As myself. My professors don't know or care what either of my parents did, or what their degrees are in. I stil have to study hard and make the grades myself.

Yes, I do have a slight advantage because I don't have to pay for my own school or take out loans (but I will if I get into med school--we aren't that rich). I won't deny that I have started out with a slighgt advantage. However, making a living as a doctor or as a lawyer is no easy task no matter what---because no matter how rich your parents are, once you get into the real world, no one else knows or cares what they did, and when it comes down to it YOU yourself have to do the work yourself in order to have that life. No one gets an MD without working very hard at some point.

Recognizer of Hilarity wrote:

Yeah, yeah, the middle class are the only truly hard-working, virtuous people, blah, blah, blah.

Rich people are slimy, wart-covered, degenerate cretins. But middle class people are their mindless drone minions. Like Igor assisting the mad Frankenstein, the middle class person is a fat, crippled half-wit who barks and rolls over for the rich person like a mangy dog begging for table scraps. Bald, weak, uncreative, bureaucratic, and conformist, the middle class person is an emblem of genetic weakness and base pusillanimity.

The middle class person toils in lifelong insignificance to produce and acquire useless junk. The middle class person is occasionally sexually functional, but usually requires fertility treatments and often surgery to successfully procreate. Predictably, since middle class people tend to inbreed with other middle class people, their offspring are even weaker. Middle class children are slow, obese, stupid, and riddled with maladies both physical and mental.

Like laboratory animals, the middle class subspecies cannot survive in nature and is destined for extinction. If you value your genetic survival. do NOT breed with a middle class person.

I do think that it takes a lot of work to be a good doctor or a good lawyer most of the time, but I think you still don't get what I'm saying at all. People who are actually middle class don't always have the same opportunities after graduating college as those with wealthy parents. When you graduate college with 50 thousand or more in student loans, you have to think long and hard about whether or not to go to grad school in the first place. People with wealthy parents who are pushing them towards law school/med school etc will spend money on their kids rent and living expenses to ensure that their kids can take those internships or whatever that will advance their careers and get them into school.

I'm not saying that you don't work hard, but I am saying that the only thing you have to do is your home work and you'll get your desired career. And you may be different than the people I am referring to. A lot of my friends from college never had to work a job that was not directly related to their ultimate career. Their parents hooked them up with legal internships over the summer, they did not work at all during the school year, their parents paid their rent after they graduated etc etc. So basically all these people had to do was not be retarded and yes show up to class and do their homework. It's not that difficult.

jay Z b wealthy and he Obamas main nigga.

Wrong, the corporations they work for pay their wages and were developed through illegality. This illegality continued and has been emphasized due to capitalism where CEO wages rose 200% from the 1960's whilst the minimum wage remained relatively stable even in lieu of inflation.

The USA was built on a deck of cards.

Because we are no longer a capitalist society that promotes success and the pursuit of success as the American dream in the way the founders envisioned it.

In 20 years, we have moved to a socialist state. Socialist states minimize the independent individual and vilify those who have aspirations and success beyond the masses. Too bad, but that is the way it works with socialist countries.

Scandinavia is the same way. So is most of Europe. They talk about the rich negatively in their tabloids because the losers in the masses are not permitted to have socially and economically mobile dreams. Very few break out.

I have heard about this book on the topic and intend to read it as soon as I can:

The New Founders. By Joseph Connor

momno wrote:

So basically all these people had to do was not be retarded and yes show up to class and do their homework. It's not that difficult.

This is true only in a limited sense.

I grew up in an upper middle class group of people in a large western city. Plenty of money around. I hung out with academic, serious kids. I am now 45.

Only about a quarter of my wealthy friends made it to upper middleclassdom as adults. Most meandered, never took a career seriously, chose the wrong line of work, just weren't very smart, etc. Few fell off the tracks, but few kept their standard of living from childhood.

To quantify - parents made $200k, they maje $75k. Fine, but for college educated people, in the middle.

So despite having a good hs education, college paid for, advantages there, about 75% fell back.

Much of the problem is rich kid disease - not taking life seriously, not working hard enough.

Smaller sample, but the 3 or 4 middle class kids I grew up with all did great. Doctors, scientists, etc. I think they probably became ambitious living with richer friends.

So my point is this: growing up rich can be a major obstacle. It is not a freeway to richland. It is often much worse than growing up in the middle.