That's a tremendously strong statement that I've never seen any factual support for, only opinion pieces with cherry-picked data from 'think-tanks'.
Rigorous looks have found precisely the opposite, for instance, from the Boston Fed's 40-year retrospective[1]:
> A variety of measures indicate that U.S. family income mobility has decreased over the 1969–2006 time span, and especially since the 1980s. Most overall relative mobility measures fell, on net, with mobility significantly lower in the 1995–2005 period than in the 1977–1987 period. Origin-specific measures also declined, with families starting in the poorest quintile less likely to make far moves (to the middle or higher quintiles) during the 10 years from 1995 to 2005 than within the 1977–1987 period.
> Similarly, absolute quintile mobility declined overall and for poor families after 1981–1991 (when real post-government income growth began to slow). Thus, families have become increasingly less likely to change rank or move out of their (relative or absolute) decile or quintile of origin, and when they move, to move less far; this appears to be the case overall and for those who start rich or poor.
[1] - http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2011/wp1110.pdf
To quote those authors: “We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the ‘birth lottery’ – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past.”
[1] http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf
the notion that some have more than others happens amongst the 99%, but the notion that it's reasonable for the owners of companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's to profit massively while refusing to pay a living wage, provide health care, or even follow basic employment laws is a growing problem that did not happen to the same extent in generations past [since employment laws were established, of course].
The notion that the people making the money are "earning" it while people doing actual work are "greedy" and "should try to get a better job if they aren't happy" etc.. is incredibly unhealthy and it is political propaganda fed to members of the 99% with a proclivity for consuming it, paid for by members of the 1% who much prefer that there is infighting amongst the various worker classes over who has a bigger house or a nicer car rather than to see that the entire system rigged against us is keeping us from living the natural lives we could all be living. you can only get someone to work a job selling a snake oil dream if you give them a taste of it and underwrite a sense of entitlement that encourages the belief that people who aren't succeeding are simply not trying, rather than the truth, which is that they aren't going along with the lie of the game, and the rest of us (self included) and our obsession with the trappings of the game keep us from living in the true reality of the world with the rest of them.
It's very beneficial to these oligarchs to remind us that, while yes, there will always be someone starving and they might just be right outside your doorstep, if you buckle up, save up for your children's college, their doorstep might be a little further from the poor.
and isn't that what it's all about, after all?
I have never seen supporting evidence of this. You can't compare perks of manufacturing jobs of the past to grocery baggers and greeters in Walmart today. An equivalent would be to compare it to a grocery store clerk in the past as well. I know they did not provide a living wage or health care back then either because my father was one in the 60s.
>The notion that the people making the money are "earning" it while people doing actual work are "greedy"
This is basic economics. If what you are doing has little demand, you won't be paid highly for it. To understand what I mean, go into a field and dig holes all day long and then demand that someone pay you for doing 'actual work'. Unless someone desperately needed those holes, you won't be paid anything regardless of the effort you put into it.
>from living the natural lives we could all be living
And what natural life would you be referring to? Tribes roaming around foraging and fighting each other for food? An even redistribution of wealth across the entire globe would drastically reduce the quality of life of >95% of US citizens.
Say we just rob and kill off the 1% since you seem to think they don't contribute. You have just eliminated many executives at large companies, most doctors, most good lawyers, many professors, and many highly-skilled senior specialists in various engineering fields. Now that you have wiped out all of these people that spent years mastering their fields, what exactly is it that you have accomplished? What lesson did we learn? They earned high salaries because they were in high demand. Is it to make sure that you never become so good at something that you will earn lots of money?
Perhaps you are confused and you didn't mean the top 1% but instead meant something like the top %0.01? 1 in every 100 people isn't a conspiring billionaire as you've concocted in your mind. Doctors and small business owners aren't getting together in a secret club each weekend to determine the political propaganda they will feed to the 99% that week.
P.S. Currently, your post is mostly nonsensical run-on sentences. Break them up if you want people to read it.
This may or may not be true, but it's not important. What is important is that a society where there is a gap between those with education, wealth, and power and those without is (presumably) less stable than one in which everyone feels as if they are in the same boat.
Additionally, I would postulate that creating a class of people who are less educated and where both parents need to work 40 or more hours a week will not create ideal households for raising children (when looked at in aggregate). They also seem to have their children at younger ages, and higher divorce rates, which again, may not lead to desirable outcomes.
It's not because it hasn't changed that it's fair and can't be improved.
> America was a country where opportunity made it so you could become wealthy.
"Several large studies of mobility in developed countries in recent years have found the US among the lowest in mobility"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
In the US moving from X to X+Y might only push you a few percent higher in rank, there are still a lot of people in the fat tails on both sides, while the same change in Scandinavia might represent a substantial rank change.
Perhaps the problem isn't that it's hard to move up in the US, the problem is that in northern Europe it's impossible to escape the rat race.
Yet the number one wealth predictor, having wealthy parents, is more true now than it was fifty years ago.