[cactus2093]

No, I wouldn't say that rings true. Yes it is objectively true, but it doesn't particularly mean anything to me or invalidate the arguments themselves.

What did really ring true for me was this line from the original essay, "Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it's really done?"

It's sad to me that any discussion of inequality has started to be so much more focused on bringing everyone at the top down rather than empowering those at the bottom and helping to bring them up.

[hndude]

>It's sad to me that any discussion of inequality has started to be so much more focused on bringing everyone at the top down rather than empowering those at the bottom and helping to bring them up.

Is there any way of empowering those at the bottom that won't take considerable energy, effort, or cost? Where should the resources come from to empower them, if not from the top?

[cactus2093]

There is a lot of money in the federal budget already that could be better spent. Much of it already goes to the safety net - medicare expenses, social security, unemployment and housing subsidies. Yes many of these programs could use bigger budgets, but a lot of what keeps it from getting into people's hands is bureaucratic overhead and bad systems, delays signing up, having to call repeatedly for weeks before you can get a hold of somebody to process your application, etc. Those things shouldn't be particularly expensive to improve if it were prioritized.

The well-documented ballooning healthcare costs make medicare more expensive in addition to hitting many citizens directly, so improvements there would have a huge impact.

Of the rest of the budget much of it goes to the military which doesn't seem to be particularly efficiently spent either in recent decades.

If more revenue really is the answer, I'm not opposed to bumping up taxes more in certain ways. I'm definitely for ideas that make taxes less regressive, for instance getting rid of the lower long-term capital tax rate is probably good idea and a simple way to raise effective tax rates on the wealthy in a massive way.

But you don't have to demonize those at the top so much to get any of this stuff done. Doing so is a major distraction, and I do genuinely worry about the self-fulfilling prophecy of drilling into everyone's head the highly exaggerated narrative that there is no hope for anyone else because the rich have completely rigged the system. And too often these days that seems to be what people focus on, rather than the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom.

[hndude]

>If more revenue really is the answer, I'm not opposed to bumping up taxes more in certain ways. I'm definitely for ideas that make taxes less regressive, for instance getting rid of the lower long-term capital tax rate is probably good idea and a simple way to raise effective tax rates on the wealthy in a massive way.

So you agree with my point.

The rest of your comment, I think you're making things a little too black and white. You make it sound like people can either bring attention to the wealth inequality that exists today("demonize those at the top"), or they can buckle down and do "the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom," but not both. I think both of those are possible at the same time. Either way, could you please share a specific example of the hard work of making real, tangible improvements in the lives of those at the bottom? It seems to me like you're echoing the old pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps argument, in a third party sense? Because I'm really not sure what sort of hard work for making real, tangible improvements wouldn't require some kind of money.

[jmchuster]

That would presumably be because many people now believe that bringing down a few super rich to benefit many non-super rich is a net positive for society. The conversation in the US has definitely shifted slightly now along the scale from trickle-down economics to universal basic income.