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Seeing how expensive it is to remain in the middle class...i'd say we are definately diminishing in being the land of opportunity. My grandfather was middle/upper middle class. My dad, subsequently, had barely any student loans. Fast forward, I graduated with 50k in debt and barely making ends meet with an income of 35k a year. This is the same salary my coworker was making when she got out of college...in the late 1980s. I want to go back to grad school.
Rents are high, gas prices (while lower than in past years) are still relatively high...
My brother, making 6 figures, lives paycheck to paycheck. But, to be fair, we do live in Southern California. However, as California goes...so does the nation. We will see that the definition of middle class will shift.
How in the world can a man making six figures live paycheck to paycheck? I don't mean any disparagement, but it seems like he is living beyond his means.
Bill Gates - son of a Bank President and a Bank Board Director
Bill with some close friends built Microsoft without the help of his dad.
Exactly so...guess the time at Harvard or the opportunities offered from making connections there didn't hurt either.
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Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE
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Originally Posted by djmilf
Warren Buffet - son of a U.S. Congressman
Started out by buiding a home for himself in his 20's in Omaha where homes are cheap. A man driving by offered to buy the home and Warren sold it to him and decided he could make money doing that, on his own without help from anyone
Again, he didn't actually pull himself out of poverty...that life as a son of a politician in Washington DC allowed him a better start than most.
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Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE
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Originally Posted by djmilf
Steve Jobs - latched onto Steve Wozniak
Missed the point about his parents being rich.
Of course you missed the point...you're obtuse.
Here it is, spelled out: No Steve Wozniak, no Apple Corporation.
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Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE
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Originally Posted by djmilf
Michael Dell - son of an orthodonist and a stock broker
Built a computer company from his dorm room in college on his own.
As opposed to building a computer company from a housing project.
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Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE
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Originally Posted by djmilf
Sam Walton - bought his first store in 1945 with the aid of a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law ($20,000 in 1945 = $240,000 in 2009)
Wow, even today $240,000 is not much money. So his father in law loaned him the money, he still took that money and made something of himself. Still wondering, were his parents rich?
Tell me, where does one go to get such a loan when one is poor?
Apparently my point eludes you...aside from Oprah Winfrey and arguably Steve Jobs, all of your examples are of people jumping from the upper middle class to the upper class.
Paul Orfalea started Kinko's with a $5,000 loan and built it to over 1,200 locations before selling off half the business for $300,000,000.
John Schmatter founded Papa Johns Pizza. He did work in a bar his dad owned half of. John sold his car to raise the money needed to buy out the other owner of the bar. He then started making Pizzas to sell to the patrons. Over time they started delivering and the company spread to over 3,300 locations.
Ken Hendricks started ABC Supply Co. Inc. when as a young roofer he noticed that the supply company he was dealing with didn't give him the service he needed. He was able to save the money to buy that first place and over the years added 330 locations across the country. He bought out supply companies that were strugling and asked the employees how they would fix the problem, then he let them fix the problem at each location. When he died not to long ago his company was valued at over $3billion. Side note: Ken died doing what he had done his entire life, He fell from a roof he was repairing. He never finished High School and became a success anyway.
You dissappoint me...you didn't mention mention Mike Ilitch, the son of Macedonian immigrants, owner of Little Caesars, the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers. Much more impressive than that Pappa John's hack.
Or people like Tiger Woods, who rose from a low income family to make $110 million last year...no, wait, his father was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army...but his father probably didn't have anything to do with Tiger's success.
Or Angelina Jolie, the daughter of a second-rate actor, she made $27 million in the past 12 months.
Even someone as humble as Mathew Stafford is going to make at least $41 million dollars in the next six years. And he had absolutely no help from wealthy parents.
See, I can pull antedotal examples out of the air too. I doesn't mean that EVERYBODY can be the top golfer in the world, or the biggest Hollywood box office draw, or the number one pick in the NFL draft.
Hell, even John Schnatter's not that successful...he doesn't own even ONE professional sports franchise. He's such a failure that some people, in an attempt to use Google factoids in place of intelligence, even misspell his name Schmatter.
It just means that some certain small percentage of people, through hard work and through circumstance and through luck, are able to wildly succeed. But it's the exception, not the norm.
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Originally Posted by SOON2BNSURPRISE
My point is that people succeed because they can, not because of a time in history. So many people say they want to live in another time. It was easier back then. Guess what? It is even easier now.
Success is even easier now. That's why the income gap between the wealthy and the poor is diminishing...
Oh wait, the entire point brought up by the OP was that the gap between the wealther and the poor is greater now than even during the 1920's.
Judging by the short list of people who have struck it rich from simple beginnings, I would say a kid has a better chance of getting a 50-million-plus contract as a professional athlete, than as a capitalist tycoon. All those ghetto kids shooting hoops have the right idea. But if you're of a dispostion that 50-million is way not enough, and you need a lot more, than capitalism is the track for you.
Judging by the short list of people who have struck it rich from simple beginnings, I would say a kid has a better chance of getting a 50-million-plus contract as a professional athlete, than as a capitalist tycoon. All those ghetto kids shooting hoops have the right idea. But if you're of a dispostion that 50-million is way not enough, and you need a lot more, than capitalism is the track for you.
Of course, there's always the option of finishing school and getting a job.
that is bek we got rid of our jobs, shipped out of the country or recruited 21 million illegal mexican workers. the normal source of income for the "middle class" is jobs. the term middle class should probably be split up since so many are lumped into it.
non professional & unskilled and semi skilled are the lower class and lower middle class. those people are the ones that are hurting. 21% of the people actually living in this country legal or otherwise have no medical coverage that is a huge income disparity.
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