There's no "truth" there. It's the same old tired "bootstrap" myth that if you just work hard enough, the riches will flow. Conservative lips get tighter than a drum when the clear "truth" is brought up that this country had much more balanced wealth distribution and a lower poverty level when the richest Americans were taxed at a 70 percent marginal rate. This is the "great" time period Trump appeals to and his base supposedly wants to return to.
Back to debunking the bootstrap myth. Truth: Most people never rise above the economic bracket into which they were born. "The study's takeaway, according to Chetty and Hendren, is the environment one is raised in determines his or her economic mobility."
https://www.newsweek.com/why-rich-st...ay-poor-363611
Why does this happen? It's easy enough to infer kids born into wealthier families have much more stable rearing environments (which improves cognitive development, even at the pre-natal level) and money for things like tutors, private schools, and brand name colleges. Furthermore, wealthy families have connections that allow for their children to get a leg up on the compe ion through all manners of nepotism and cronyism. The event that should've exploded the ty bootstrap myth was that college admissions scandal.
More "truth." To afford the national average monthly rent/mortgage cost, you need to make 22.00 an hour. The federally mandated minimum wage is 7.25 hr. Even the state with the highest minimum wage (where cost of living is higher) is only about 14 an hour. The conserva response to this is that minimum wage jobs are there for teenagers who want some pocket money or job experience and not intended to be a career. This is horse . We're a service economy now, so more and more people have no choice but to rely on minimum wage restaurant and cashier jobs as their means of income (in the "great America," the job market was dominated by relatively high paying factory work that you could get fresh out of high school). Combine this truth with truth number 1, and you can see how immensely difficult upward mobility is.
The only people who trumpet the bootstrap myth are those that were fortunate enough to buck the odds, and I find it a highly arrogant position to say, "Well, if I could do it, so can you. Just work harder!" There's plenty of janitors and fast food workers working plenty hard, but they won't find the same opportunity path as the bootstrapper who speaks in Horatio Alger clichés. Every person's situation is different.