[michaelvkpdx]

This is only new for people who did not grow up in poverty. For those of us who were below the middle class, the daily competition to avoid last place was a fact of life in school and in college, and those behaviors and scars don't heal easily, even after you've escaped the pit.

Upward mobility is not completely a myth, but it's a dream akin in actual probability to making it in professional sports, at least here in the USA (in my case, growing up just across the Bay from Silicon Valley).

"Trickle down economics"- aka "Reaganomics"- the great dream of the Republicans- has exacerbated the situation over the last 35 years. I wonder how I was lucky enough to get out.

The rich don't need to keep the poor down, sadly. The poor do a good enough job of keeping one another down.