Income Inequality and Wealth

Money

Much ado has been made of the rising income gap and the perceived shift in power.

A note:

Eighty-six percent of today’s millionaires did not consider themselves wealthy growing up (“self-made”), while only 14 percent said they grew up wealthy (“born-wealthy”). Key findings include:

Of those who are self-made, their top sources of assets included investments/capital appreciation, compensation and employee stock options/profit sharing. Those who were born wealthy were more likely than the self-made group to cite inheritance, entrepreneurship and real estate investment appreciation as an asset source.

Better than 5 in 6 of America’s wealthy created their own wealth.  And the method they used was work.

5 responses to “Income Inequality and Wealth

  1. It used to puzzle me why so many rich people donate to the Democratic Party. In 2008 Obama received much more Wall Street money than McCain. In 2012 Obama got less than Romney, but why did he get any? Outside of Wall St. plenty of rich people gave to President Obama and the Democrats and still do. So what’s up?

    Well under Obama the gap between rich and poor has widened. It seems counter intuitive, but numbers don’t lie. There seems to have been a secret bargain struck. The rich allow themselves to be scapegoated for all the ills of the nation, and behind the scenes Obama lets them get richer and richer, while blaming the Republicans.

    Obama’s policies seem to protect the rich who are already rich. They seem to protect them from any new rich rising from the lower classes and competing with them.

  2. Better than 5 in 6 of America’s wealthy created their own wealth
    No, 5 in 6 wealthy Americans say that they didn’t consider themselves wealthy growing up. That’s very different. We’re a nation of almost pathological liars when it comes to self-reporting, whether it’s how often we go to church or listen to NPR. And this question isn’t about whether they were wealthy, it was whether they considered themselves wealthy, which is a useless formulation.

    their top sources of assets included investments/capital appreciation, compensation and employee stock options/profit sharing.

    Capital appreciation does not involve work, at all. Compensation does, unless they mean things like “a job I got in my dad’s company.” Stock options…well, that’s a pretty silly one. Very very few people are offered stock options, and anyone who suggests that that’s a road to wealth is well out-of-touch with reality. It’s like saying the best way to avoid foreclosure is to sell your summer home.

    By the way, did you notice what they count as millionaires? “[T]he millionaire group had investable assets of at least $1 million; both groups’ investable assets were excluding workplace retirement accounts and any real estate holdings.” So, millionaire here meant a Fidelity customer who had at least a million bucks sitting in a bank account. And you’re presenting this as though it was a real poll…

  3. In the private sector, how many of us ever got a job from a poor man? I must be wrong. There are all kinds of leftists working for people poorer than they are.

    All of those working at Apple and at MicroSoft would not be making the big bucks now if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had not been greedy capitalist pigs. The US would not have had the industrial base to win WW2 if not for rich greedy capitalists like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Billy Durant, and Henry Kaiser.

  4. I did not think of that phrase, but thank you. It fits what Obama and his merry band of socialists preach constantly to the uninformed. Scapegoats or witches, it’s all the same. When the Gods turn against our Omnipotent political leaders blame must be transferred. The Pharoahs in ancient Egypt probably found some rich guy to blame when the Nile river did not perform it’s life giving flood.

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