[boriscleto]

... and otherwise pack up a suitcase of money and light out for the territories or Mexico...

Just like Willard's Great Granpa!

Then - as now - there was a large minority of people who lucked into being in the right place at the right time and got in on the ground floor of some generational business innovation.

Just like Willard's dad....of course he was on welfare until the war...WW I that is. WW II made him rich.

[Nesster]

Just like Willard's dad....of course he was on welfare until the war...WW I that is. WW II made him rich.

Don't forget Willard himself! He was in the right place at the right time for hedge funds and leveraged buyouts... and myself, for that matter, in the right time and place for the Wall St technology boom...

[jeffkrol]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/opinion/krugman-disdain-for-workers.html?_r=0

Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”

...Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.

Charts:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/19/heres-why-the-4...e-of-tax-data/