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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (111444)	3/20/2012 8:33:19 PM
From: John Vosilla	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Its much more likely you can go from the lower class to middle class in one lifetime so long as you get educated. I think that's true even now. I think that has remained true for a long time going back to the post WWII era. Getting wealthy or financially independent for J6P takes much more usually owning a business and a bunch of RE. But my point was if you were in say the Bay Area, NYC, Boston during those golden times you could almost throw a dot as it was much, much easier since RE values are even now up perhaps 20-25 fold since the late 1950's and during much of that time economically the areas that these folks controlled were on a constant economic upswing..

To: tejek who wrote (111444)	3/21/2012 7:04:05 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Actually, in my lifetime, it was entirely possible for almost anyone to borrow money to go to college, work part time throughout, and become a millionaire. If you are disciplined enough and save a good chunk of your earnings for the 45 years of your worklife after college, it's pretty easy to become a millionaire. It's easier if you have a white collar job, but it can be done with a union blue collar job. However, that dream is being relentlessly crushed now. I'm someone who borrowed money to go to college and I worked 20-30 hours per week the entire time I was there. I graduated with $25k in loans and that was considered a hell of a lot of money back then. However, the rates were reasonable and I paid it all off within 5 years of getting out of college. I worked for a few years and then went back for an MBA. Then my earnings potential skyrocketed. Nowadays, kids are borrowing 2-3 times as much as I did. They'll be lucky as hell to be able to pay it all back in a reasonable timeframe. What many people don't realize is that in the last 10 years consumer credit has gone up a hockey stick curve and a very large chunk of that has been loans for college by our kids. The reason is that the cost of college education has grown uncontrollably. It's one more example of how private industry and collusion is driving up the cost of the basic building blocks for a prosperous life. This kind of thing is putting the good life further and further out of reach of most Americans. I made enough money in my life to put a large chunk of change down when each of my kids were born. That chunk of change grew into what was needed to get them through college. I only had to add to it a couple of times when they were growing up to keep it on track. My kids will graduate debt free. They will be part of the lucky 1%. I feel lucky, but I also know in my bones that this system is rigged to favor people like me. The policies of Obama, the Dems, and the GOP are rigging this entire country's economy to favor people like me. Hell, the most recent idiocy is that whenever the stock market tries to correct, Bernanke unleashes a new and inventive liquidity program to prop up prices even more. He won't even let the free market set prices based on supply, demand, and risk allocation anymore. It's a sugar high. It's stupid, because it is destroying the American Dream and it will eventually destroy the prosperity of this country, which the American Dream enables. Central economic planning NEVER works. It always results in misallocation of capital, aka malinvestment, which we have to pay for later. Prosperity isn't build on looting, financial fraud, lack of prosecutions, and money printing. It's built on tough regulations overseeing capitalism, allowing the criminal enterprises to go bankrupt, fairness, stable currencies, and boring banking.