CDZ I have had it with this saying, "The working people in America...."

[320 Years of History]

"...American workers can’t cut it..."
-- Marco Rubio

...working people are skeptical..."
-- Donald Trump

"....support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening...."
-- Hillary Clinton

"....working people can’t make him the boss...."
-- Elizabeth Warren

People need to cease and desist with that phrase. Who are "the working people in America?"

• U.S. workforce population: ~250M
• Unemployment rate: ~5%
• Percent of Americans who receive trust funds: 1.3%. God knows how many of them have trusts that are generous enough that they don't have to work and also don't work. For the sake of easy math, we'll say that 3/10ths of a percent live exclusively on their trust income.
• Retired people: I'm going to count them as "working people" because they did, and if they weren't already old enough to have retired, they'd be working.

Based on that, it seems to me that "working people" constitutes damn near everybody! I know just like you do that everybody cannot possibly be all the things we hear in the popular press tha they are, that they thinks, etc.


Now, there was once a time when in the U.S. we understood that work was the means by which we pursued our other happinesses, the greatest happiness providers being our families and that which we did as compensated toil.

• Thomas Jefferson:
  • I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
  • Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.
• The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. work is the key to success, and hard work can help you accomplish anything. ― Vince Lombardi, Jr.
  
• The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense. ― Thomas A. Edison
• The Six Steps to Success: 1) Define Success 2) Devise a Plan 3) Execute and Overcome Adversity 4) Measure Results with Key Metrics 5) Revise the Plan 6) Work Hard ― Ken Poirot
  
• If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhered to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day.
  ― John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton

These days, however, so much of what one hears is how hard it is for "working people" to "whatever." Excuse the "eff" outta me! Anyone who thinks that successful folks found their success complaining about how hard it is to become successful is needs to crawl back under their rock. People who enjoy success do so not by wishing things were easier, but by doing what they must to be better.

So enough with the "working people this" and the "hard working people that." The hardest working people are the ones who are successful, and mostly, successful folks aren't the ones complaining.

 

[Mudda]

Personally, I'm tired of people who do nothing but copy&paste.

 

[1stRambo]

Yo, maybe change it to, Working Slaves, sounds about right!

"GTP"