Why should it? The rich are so because they've accumulated capital. Capital begets capital. Rather than disparaging the successful, should be a motivation and incentive for all to aspire to become rich themselves.
not the stock market alone, 50% stocks 50% bonds, and I am comfortable with dipping into the the principal in down years
Right and when when they get stupid and screw up, then the tax payer bails out their mistakes.. makes perfect sense. Privatize gains and socialize loses, that's what making money is all about!
Someone once told me that it is hard to become a millionaire. I asked why that was. He said it was obvious, the reason was that there are so few of them, therefore ergo, it must be hard to become one. That never really made any sense to me. It's like saying so few people have gone to the moon therefore it must be hard to go to the moon. The correct way to look at it is to see how many people are (seriously) trying to become millionaires (or trying to go to the moon). That base number of people is much smaller than the population of a country. In the US, there may be only say 50 million people trying to become millionaires. If you then consider there are over 10 million millionaires already, i dunno, maybe the odds aren't so bad...
I guess I was never moved, because it only seems like a logical conclusion to how our system is set up. US markets are the most widely used markets in the world. Globalization shifted us massively to an investor-based economy. Lobbyism for rules and lack thereof becomes a part of the system. China with their sheer size and manipulative government sits upon it all, tapping into the US capitalist system (whoah shocker, most new millionaires here).
I don't think so for most families, when a heir screws up big time, most likely the family with go down the social ladder. Although one can hope most of the family members growing up in well off circles with good educational opportunities will at least be able to keep a comfortable middle class lifestyle even though much of the inherited wealth has been squandered ( lots of descendants and estate tax doesn't help trans generational wealth)
Your view makes perfect sense, in Europe where the welfare states take away a lot of worries regarding health issues and retirement it's obvious a lot of people do away rather happily with the idea of getting a very moderate income and little savings. Ime it's neither hard the save 1 million nor much money at all if you are looking to be wealthy and independent from the state.