AMC?

So, Mitt's dad, George Romney, ran for president in 1968 as the man who brought us the Gremlin?

Mr. Romney’s father, George, also made it to the top rungs of the corporate ladder. He was an automobile executive who, in 1947, named his youngest son — the one now running for president — Willard Mitt Romney, in honor of J. Willard Marriott, a close friend who later founded the Marriott hotel chain. In 1954, George Romney was appointed chief executive of the American Motors Corporation, maker of the Rambler and the Hudson Hornet cars.

He earned an average of about $275,000 a year over the next decade, according to tax returns that he released to a writer for Look magazine when the elder Mr. Romney was preparing to run for president in 1968. That translates to about $1.8 million a year in today’s dollars.

By any standard, George Romney was a rich man. But he did not make anything close to what his son has made. Mitt Romney is worth as much as $350 million today, making him one of the wealthiest presidential candidates in recent decades.

The differences between the two generations of Romneys are remarkably consistent with broader trends. George Romney’s pay as a chief executive put him in the 99.99th percentile of the income distribution, meaning that he was making more money than all but 1 in 10,000 other Americans at the time.

In 2005, someone at the equivalent spot in the distribution earned almost $10 million, according to research by two economists, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. This richest 0.01 percent of earners made 5.1 percent of all income that year, up from just 1.2 percent in 1960.

I know, I know, the Gremlin wasn't introduced until 1970, but still...