No wonder liberals aren't happy people. You spend so much of your time making up depressing fairy tales. The FACT is that 80% of the millionaires in this country are first generation rich. In case you aren't sure what that means, it means that their parents weren't rich.
You paint a pretty dismal picture for people born in poor areas. Let me tell you about one. His name is Farrah Gray. He was raised in a predominantly black Chicago neighborhood. At age 8, he started a lemonade stand business, later a venture capital business, a food business and a magazine. By age 17, Farrah Gray was a millionaire, had been chief executive of four companies, and had offices on Wall Street, and in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Imagine, a poor black kid, born in a poor black neighborhood making a million by the time he was 17.
While he isn't typical (even for upper middle class white kids) he shows that it is possible. In fact, it is more than possible to become rich in this country.
Of those 80% of the first generation rich, fewer than 20 percent inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth. More than half never received as much as a dollar in inheritance. Fewer than 25 percent received "an act of kindness" from a relative greater than $10,000, and 91 percent never received, as a gift, as much as $1 from the ownership of a family business.
According to IRS tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in any given year moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile within the next 10 years. The fact is that a very small percentage of the people in this country spend their whole lives poor and of those who do, personal choices are nearly always the reason.
What sort of people are liberals who preach pessimism and doom to people -- telling them that they're poor because others are rich or telling blacks that they'll never make it because of societal racism? What sort of people are the politicians, media pundits and college professors who preach the politics of envy, telling people lies that the rich became rich off the backs of the poor? If you really want to help, then try telling the truth and the truth is that this is America and you can be whatever you set your mind to be.
