catk, our white forbears didn’t just get jobs. They also got their generation’s equivalent of foodstamps and healthcare: free turkeys and other foodstuffs, medical connections, government welfare programs, etc…. They made it into the economic mainstream with some significant help from taxes. Contrary to the current right-wing mythos, they were not born in log cabins that they built themselves. Just like today’s immigrants and poor people, most of them were hardworking Americans who needed some assistance to make ends meet when their wages came up woefully short, and just like today, some of them were layabouts. There always have been, and always will be, a percentage of “welfare queens” from every culture. It’s an unfortunate reality, but negligible in comparison to the corporate welfare queens who receive a much larger cut of taxes and take a much larger bite out of the American job market by cutting wages to the bone and shipping jobs overseas. Even today, there isn’t a single American, rich or poor, who hasn’t gotten some sort of “hand-out” from the government at some time. And taxes are way lower on the rich than they were in Eisenhower’s time. The only reason this is a controversy is because a lot of our rich people are quasi-racist assholes with short memories and an unprecedentedly pathological hatred of the public sector.