The “new rich” those that were born with nothing got rich by working hard. You can’t get rich starting from nothing without busting your ass.

Sure, no one here is arguing otherwise. If you start with nothing and want to become rich, you’re going to have to work hard, especially considering all of the taxes you’re going to have to pay on your way to the top.

When rich people get incentives it causes them to work harder, not less.

Again, it depends on your definition of “rich”. The only truly rich people earn all of their money from passive investments, so they’re not doing any productive work anyway. Give them tax breaks and they’ll continue not working — they’ll just make more money doing it.

People who work for others have no way of understanding this.

What does that have to do with anything?

The data is what it is and the data shows our system punishes the most productive members of our system.

I agree 100%. What the data show is that the middle and upper-middle classes are carrying more than their fair share of the load, and that their load is increasing. Note that you won’t see any WSJ articles like this that look at the statistics of those whose income is derived from passive investments rather than productive labor, because it would show a very different picture; one of the main reasons that the WSJ exists is to make sure that we don’t get to see that picture.