Who's Correct--Edwards or Romney? Recommended Reading

New York Times
December 23, 2007

Age of Riches

2 Candidates, 2 Fortunes, 2 Views of Wealth
By David Leonhardt  

By the final weeks of 1984, well before either turned 40, John Edwards and Mitt Romney had already built successful careers. But the two men were each on the verge of an entirely new level of financial success.

Mr. Edwards, then making a nice salary as a lawyer at a small North Carolina firm, spent early December staying at the Inn on the Plaza in downtown Asheville. Scattered around his room were legal documents relating to his first big malpractice case, a lawsuit filed by a man named E. G. Sawyer, confined to a wheelchair after his doctor had overprescribed a drug. On Dec. 18, at the courthouse opposite the hotel, a jury awarded Mr. Sawyer $3.7 million.

In Boston, Mr. Romney had risen to become a vice president at Bain & Company, an upstart management consulting firm, and had recently been chosen to run a spinoff investment firm known as Bain Capital. He spent the end of 1984 flying around the country — in coach class, to save money and to show his investors how serious he was about turning a profit — visiting companies and deciding whether to invest in them.

In the decade that followed, Mr. Edwards would win one big verdict after another, and Mr. Romney would oversee a series of hugely profitable investments.

Like thousands of other Americans in a global, high-technology economy in which government was pulling back and wealth was being celebrated, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney used talent, hard work and — as both have suggested — luck to amass multimillion-dollar fortunes. They became a part of a rising class of the new rich.

Whether this class is a cause for concern — whether it deserves some blame for the economic anxiety felt by many middle-class families — has become a central issue in the 2008 presidential race. And Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney are basing their candidacies in large measure on the very different lessons each has taken from his own success.

[This balanced article is well worth reading ... here.]