re: Nice opinion piece on income inequality from CNN

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Life isn't fair bitch. I suggest you DWI.

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Sometimes I call the 700 Club number and tell them that. I don't understand their angry response. Don't they understand that in a few generations, the families that are mega rich will only be really rich?

Most of the .01% where all the wealth is concentrated did no work to earn their fortune. It's also not fair that someone has an advantage because their daddy is rich. I work 12 hours a day by the way and only sometimes get Sundays off.

Not fair, i'm sure you are trolling but have some pride. Is it isn't fair that you were born in america as opposed to some third world shithole?

You can only control what you do now. Don't look at others and try and tear them down, all that does is lower the bar.

And lots of people work long hours too, I've been at the office since 5:45 and will probably leave around that time this evening.

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I find it funny that he seems to champion Steve Jobs in this article who was quite stingy with his fortune.

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And a complete piece of shite of a human being.

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And exploitative of cheap foreign labor. But, Bill Gates was the evil capitalist...

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fricking a-hole with his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He's only donated $28 billion of his own money to it.

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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He's only donated $28 billion of his own money to it.

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I think the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has amazing potential. Especially alongside the giving pledge they promote. I know Warren Buffet pledged most of his fortune to the foundation. With that kind of wealth concentrated in a single foundation they will have a chance to create real changes and long lasting solutions to problems, instead of just throwing smaller amounts of money in a bunch of different places to just try and hold on.

Yeah, it's the culture of the rich that are the real problem. People who tend to be hard working and law abiding citizens. Can't be the poor, who are largely uneducated, from broken families, and more violent. Whose going to break into your house and shoot up your family? Steve Jobs' kids, or is it going to be Crackhead Bob and his kids?

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Extremely hard to make something out of nothing. All the rich or semi-rich people I know got a big help from their families. All of them. Yes it's possible to make something out of nothing but it's rare.

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It's called the "poverty trap" for a reason.

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a smart worker is more valuable than a hard worker.

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I agree.

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But I don't think it is fair that some people are born with the advantage of having more intelligence than others.

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It's not. It's the same for people who are born bigger and stronger than others. I'd love to play in the NBA, but even if I worked out and practiced non-stop for a decade I wouldn't even be halfway capable of cracking a professional roster.

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Yep, and the same who are born into wealth.

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I agree 100%.

I think a lot of people on this board need to accept the fact that so much of our potential is decided well before we're even born. Who your parents are and where you grow up have as much to do (if not much more to do) with becoming successful as ones work ethic.

That's why the "hard work" argument is so fricking obnoxious. It's self-serving and smug; it's ignorant of the economic and social realities of wealth; and it suggests, rather nefariously, that those who aren't successful have only their personal shortcomings to blame.

It's also incredibly lazy thinking.

ETA: I say this as someone who was born into a well-off family and never had to worry about a thing growing up. My education, my car, my health, etc., that was all taken care of by mom and dad. I didn't even have to pay tuition for undergrad or grad school. Yeah, I'm a good worker (not a particularly great one) and ambitious enough to succeed, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that if I were born to a single mother in the Lower Ninth Ward my story would turn out just as well. I owe a lot of who I am to my family and my environment growing up, things which are entirely out of my control.

Well, I didn't read the article, and I can't tell who is trolling who in this thread so I'll just leave my thoughts on income inequality here.

Most seem to miss the point, and label those that want to fight income inequality as jealous of the rich. For me, that couldn't be further from the case. I enjoy having money, but it doesn't motivate me. I live a comfortable life with my middle class wages. I grew p relatively poor(not really there were just 5 kids in my family and the dollar was stretched) The problem is the rate of income growth for the wealthy has far outpaced the rate of growth for the poor and middle class. You'd expect that for the poor, but it is alarming when compared to the middle class. The middle class is being squeezed by both ends, and that's not a good thing.