Letterman thinks the land of opportunity is under attack.
.akes sense. Two of the whitest.
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That’s not correct.
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One of the reasons I would argue the main reason the middle class is getting wiped out is all the outsourcing and sourcing. Its at insane levels now
It won’t just be us software developers that are getting affected by this one day it’ll reach other jobs I would imagine when 100,000 Vietnamese teachers come here willing to work for 1/4 of the wage that Americans work for there might be more uproar about this.
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Both Dave and John agree on this issue ?
It appears you read neither the article, nor my post/comments, but read only the word “billionaire.”
The Forbes list is always 400 people. It’s not like there used to be 200 then 300 then 400.
More importantly the article states
"Over the past 30 years, the origin of the wealth of the richest people in the United States has shifted away from old, inherited money. Our new metric, the self-made scores developed for the Forbes 400, shows that increasingly we find self-made billionaires among the ranks of the richest people in the country. . . .
In 1984, the first year for which we have crunched the numbers, we found that nearly one-fourth of the members of the Forbes 400 inherited their fortunes and weren’t doing anything to grow them. . . .
At the same time, only 2.5% were ranked as 10s, or absolute bootstrappers. To qualify as a 10, a member of the Forbes 400 had to have been raised in a poor household, and have endured extreme duress. Oprah Winfrey, who endured sexual abuse, and George Soros, who survived both the Nazi and Communist occupations of Hungary, are great examples. . . .
. . . the most encouraging results come from this year’s Forbes 400. For the first time in our data set, we see the number of self-made billionaires who rose from nothing, and overcame various tough obstacles, outpacing those that just sat on their fortunes. A total of 34 billionaires, or 8.5%, scored as 10s, or more than three times as many as in 1984. . . .
The number of 100% inherited fortunes as a percentage of the total fell to 7%, with 28 billionaires in the 1 category, compared to 99 back in 1984. . . .
This thread is about whether America is the “land of Opportunity.”
As far as “making it to the top” goes when we look at the actual list of the actual mega wealthy (not some imaginary idea in a Marxist-educated mind) we find that YES America is the land of opportunity. Whatever stupid stereotypes public school taught you were wrong.
The rules changed with Reaganomics. The wealth used to be shared more equally under the New Deal economics.
The Rand corporation documented this in a huge study, showing how the wealth shifted from the middle/lower middle class…to the ultra rich. They do not put the blame on any one thing.
But all one has to do is compare tax rates, regulations, the enforcement of the Sherman act, and union participation rates, between those 2 economic philosophies.
Friedman vs Keynes
One created the greatest middle class, the other screwed the middle class.
Q. When you print and give $100 (or $1,000 or $2,000) to everyone in the middle class (Keynes) what do they do with it?
A. They spend it on hot dogs, and shoes for their kids and other basic necessities of life (and sometimes they splurge a little)
Fair enough?
Sound like the right answer?
Flooding the nation with all the world’s impoverished citizens should help though, right?
Absolutely not, I am completely against illegal immigration, including people who abuse asylum laws.
Hey look at all the great things they did for their own countries.
Whoever winds up with those people wins, right?
Unfortunately, a lot of people, when they say that mean nothing more than
“Legalize the flood of immigrants. take all the illegals and start calling them legal. See? Problem solved.”
I am waiting for the teachers’ unions to be replaced with contractors from India.
With the internet, many jobs can be done remotely.
Not me, it is one of the issues I agree with Trump on.
I am glad to hear that. 
