Bootstraps versus Silver Spoons

In honor of the republican presidential ticket: two rich white guys who never worked a day in their parasitical lives:

David Atkins nails why I say that all rich people today got that way only by cheating all the people who are poor today. So jail everyone who has more than a billion dollars, confiscate all - 100 percent - income above $1,000,000 per year and distribute it equally among everybody else.

No, I am not fucking kidding.

Anyone who can stand to watch that smug, self-assured pompous jerk [Bill O'Reilly, but Mitt and Paul are just as bad if not worse] tell the single mothers who work 50 hours a week and struggle to get by, or workers who take low-wage barista jobs after grad school because there are no decent thinking jobs left, or the unfortunate middle-aged Americans who get laid off at 55 years old after 30 years in the same field and can't get hired again due to age discrimination and inability to completely retrain, or people who grew up in delapidated, unpoliced virtual war zones where joining a gang often seems like the best of way of protecting oneself, to simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps despite decades of wage stagnation even as all the productivity gains go to the top--well, much can be said of them but none of it good.

There is a good reason that fewer Americans were on welfare in the 1960s: a single income could support an entire family (which in turn led to fewer child care costs at the expense of women's freedom), good jobs were available right out of high school, companies tended to provide lifetime careers with job security for workers, the pace of life and work was slower and carried fewer cost expectations (just about any decent job these days expects you to have Internet and a cell phone), etc. Oh, and minorities were treated as less than human and often lived in appalling conditions, too.

If over half of this country is suffering from such Stockholm Syndrome combined with racist animosity that they're not repulsed by the arguments from this gasbag and those like him, then they deserve the grinding impoverishment they receive at the hands of the moneyed elite.

Read the whole thing.