Langone on OWS: Grow Up Already You Big Babies

Former NYSE Director and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone puts NYT/CNBC dweeb Andrew Ross Sorkin some f'n knowledge about the rabble in Zuccotti Park.

"The kids downtown, I'd view them as babies in adults' bodies," Langone said in a live interview. "I don't think they know what they want to be when they grow up."

...

"The generation of children in public schools in America today is the first generation that's going to have a lower literacy rate than the previous generation," Langone said. "There are jobs all over, but you need to be able to count."

Langone wrapped up his lesson for the young whippersnapper thusly:

Let me tell you the biggest down side of the welfare state. We are taking the self-respect of these people away. During the depression, my grandfather who went to -- he left school at 6 years old and he had a shovel in his hand his entire life. During the depression, my grandfather refused to go with what was called home relief. Refused it. He said, no, I'm gonna go out and work. I see taking away people's dignity by them believing they're living off somebody else. and that's the biggest -- that's the highest price we're going to pay over the long term.

And then he went down to Zuccotti Park and told the protesters to get off his damned lawn. Not really ... but I'm sure he wanted to.

Watch the whole thing. It's chock-full of goodness.

One of the topics they bring up hear the end is "income inequality", on which Michele Caruso-Cabrera had the killer line: "there used to be no income inequality in China because everyone was poor. This is a tradeoff you accept for growth and freedom." Bingo!

Jimmy Pethokoukis also had a couple of good columns on this topic today. The first is on the OWSers' and Obama's (BIRM) obsession with inequality and the second excerpts from a new study on the topic.

For most people, income increases over time as they move from a usually low-paying first job to better-paying jobs later in life. Some others, however, may lose income over time due to business cycle contractions, demotions, career changes, retirement, and so on. Because incomes are not constant over time, the same households do not necessarily remain in the same income quintiles. Thus, comparing income quintiles from different years is a proverbial apples-to-oranges comparison because the households compared are at different stages in their earnings profile.

To which everybody but liberal Democrats and Former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman replies, "duh."

posted by Andy at 07:57 PM

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