Goodbye, Horatio Alger, or Where Have You Gone, Ragged Dick?

One of the great cultural bastions in American society is the belief that with hard work and a bit of luck, one can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become "somebody." This cherished axiom has wended itself through American history, from the early days of the Puritans to the supposedly self-reliant American West, whose fiercely independent farmers discreetly tuck away the gummint subsidy in the bank while loudly proclaiming the virtues of self-sufficiency as a truly American way of life.

This lovely myth has been exploded in a recent study published the other day. Yep, despite the uplifting tales of lowly immigrants and orphan boys rising from the gutters of the urban slums to the halls of the wealthy, the chance that someone starting out at the bottom and reaching the creme de la creme of American society is just one percent. Yep, 1%. On the other hand, you have a one-in-five chance of joining the moneyed classes if you already began life with a silver spoon in your mouth. George W. Bush may have gone to San Jacinto Junior High, sure, but Daddy went to Andover, so Junior went to Andover as well. The average kid at San Jacinto certainly didn't wind up in prep school, but then again, the average kid didn't come from a family with a fortune founded in the China opium trade a couple generations earlier.

The same is true for tons of other trust-fund kids all over America. The sad truth is that close to 99% of us are never going to be rich; we're gonna live and die poor, working class, or middle class, at best. For every example you can come up with of someone like Andrew Carnegie, there's a million more that never reach that zenith. Remember that the next time you feel like giving Bush and Congress a pass when they mention tax cuts for the rich.