50 years ago, when you said "the rich", it would mean descendants of Carnegie, Hersey, or other big name company builders who created monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The majority of "the rich" were lawyers and doctors with Ivy League degrees and long pedigrees.

Today's rich are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, Gabe Newell, Elon Musk. While you'd call them perhaps middle class, or upper middle class (Gates and Zuckerberg went to Harvard afterall), their empires are clearly self-built and self-sustained. These people did not inherit their riches like "the old rich" did.

The "new rich" suffer from boom and bust cycles. 20% of Americans will find themselves in the position of "New Rich" for at least a year, before their self-built empire falls back down to middle-class or lower status.

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/business-headlines/201312...

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I admit... this is partly because college tuition rates were much much lower for Generation X / Baby Boomers than it is today. Government programs for education were never stronger than in those years. Today's young face rising tuition rates as education costs are cut... and for-profit schools have started up to more or less steal money from today's youth.

Sorry, still plenty of rich people who earn their money the old fashion way... They inherited it.

I wasn't even talking about individuals but a system that rewards people who already have wealth over the working poor and middle class. Worse, now with the "Citizens United" ruling we are creating a plutocracy that our Founding Fathers feared more then anything.