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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: TimF who wrote (353319)	10/3/2007 7:50:30 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) of 1576635

Even though the wealth gap is a positive in most economies for driving the economic creativity of those not-yet-rich, much is made of it in the media and among politicians who worry about individual wealth consolidation even more than they do the corporate kind. A quick look at the Forbes 400 would surely assuage some of their fears. "The wealth gap is a positive in most societies". Why? That's a significant statement and yet, there is no explanation as to why. Its assumed everyone who reads it is in on the joke. Indeed, of the charter members of the first Forbes 400, only 32 remain today. Far from a country where only the rich get richer, the wealthy in the US are very much a moving target. While there are 74 Forbes 400 members who inherited their entire fortune, 270 members are entirely self-made. Though many attended Harvard, Yale and Princeton, there are countless stories within of high school and college dropouts, not to mention others who grew up extremely poor. Politicians who regularly engage in class warfare would do well to keep the Forbes 400 out of the hands of their constituents, because it makes a mockery of the kind "Two Americas" rhetoric suggesting the existence of a glass ceiling that keeps hard workers at the bottom of the economic ladder. To read the Forbes 400 is to know with surety that the U.S. is still very much the land of opportunity. You guys just won't get it. Even if all 400 hundred were self made....that's only 400 out of a total population of 300 million people. And that's exactly the point.......more and more of America's wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few people. Furthermore, the issue isn't whether people can go from poverty to riches in a generation; there are people who can do it but again, the number is so few. The vast majority get caught somewhere in the middle no matter how hard they work. And while some of the self made truly come from poverty, most had a good headstart like Bill Gates who comes from an affluent Seattle family and had a legacy to Harvard. What makes this a bigger issue is the myth that America is the land of milk and honey where anyone can be rich if they work hard. It just ain't so.

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