How America's Top 20 Percent Perpetuates Inequality

... likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill...

What are the unintended consequences of this slightly higher tax bill? Does this writer not know of the Laffer Curve? The top 20% already pay the vast majority of income taxes in the United States And now he suggests they should pay more? Why not instead reprioritize spending, including cuts to programs that are proven not to work?

The "War on Poverty" has not resulted in any significant change to US poverty rates yet money is still spent on those programs. Farm subsidies, social security and Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abuse and the defense department's propensity to bleed money-- there are many areas that can and should be addressed before simply raising taxes.

And what about college cost inflation? College expenses have risen more dramatically than health costs. Could the influx of easy public money and loans have something to do with it? Look at the cartel's controlling textbooks and scientific journals! We lose our collective minds over Uber surge pricing but say nothing about $200 textbooks that were often written by professors working for public institutions. In universities you have countless Provosts and vice Provosts who pretty much add no value. You have administrators who simply administer other administrators. It's a racket of which the mafia could be proud. Adjunct professors barely scrape by while the "Director of Residental Student Diverisity Affairs" makes six figures. Many on the left like to complain about CEO pay yet let academia have a free pass to hand out titles and six figure non-teaching jobs out like candy -- all on the backs of students and indirectly, the taxpayer. If we want to expand educational access then the universities ought to start with themselves: cut the waste, lower the price. But they won't do that; the "liberals" in charge of universities actually perpetuate the educational inequality they purport to oppose. It certainly isn't conservatives in the Ivy League that maintain legacy based admissions or $80,000 per year price tags.

The problem isn't that taxes are too low, it's that government does a bad job when it comes to budgeting and fiscal policy.

I am not opposed to "left wing" proposals as much as I am opposed to "raising taxes and redistributing wealth" as the only means presented as the way to accomplish those proposals.

Zero-based budgeting would be a good start. Then every year the government can better allocate money rather than just continually adding to whatever the previous year's expenditures happen to have been.

I agree that Ferguson protests and BLM and so on are reactions to power and injustice. Are they going to change the arc of history? Doesn't look like it. Trump may present himself as an anti-establishment figure, but his appointments show he's totally beholden to establishment figures. His policy proposals so far are the standard GOP spiel. Sure, people are angry but does anything change?

> If you are driving through a bad part of town and get mugged,

Rich people don't drive through bad neighborhoods. People who live in gated communities don't get hit by stray bullets from gang wars. I don't think appealing to the self-interest of rich people works here. They're already looking out for themselves, and the trendline is pretty clear.

> Immigrants will always be poor.

Look, are you're really going to argue that immigrants having bad teeth is the natural order of things, and not a consequence of the availability and affordability of dental care? (And what about the dental health of Nascar fans? Not class related either, I presume!)

An interesting perspective, feels cynical to me. I fully support progressive taxation, free education, public transit, affordable health care and so-forth. I would argue that government is a service provider. We can't all be expected to maintain our own defense, so we do it together. When we are provided these services that are equal to or greater than the value that we pay for them, we are richer for it. There is no redistribution there. The more wealth you have the more valuable the local police force is to you. The wealthy need educated employees. Government is able to organize childcare services that keep low income workers in the workforce, that helps everyone.

I would beg you to look for a much more nuanced understanding of the people whom you oppose politically.

Attempting to reduce all the of the great Conservative/Libertarian arguments for not wanting top-down tyrannical centralized high-tax government that takes away liberty to instead being single-mindedly rooted in racism, homophobia, etc. may make you feel better that your opponents are irrational emotionally-driven zealots -- but you've so missed the mark on comprehending the people who oppose you that you're only helping to further the enormous divide of understanding that we have in politics today.

I would beg you to try to understand that the whole 'Conservative/Democrat' divide as far as I can see from some distance is utterly ridiculous in the eyes of a good chunk of the world.

If gays/guns/racism and abortion were not hot political buttons in the United States the Republicans would likely never win an election.

Libertarians have to all practical intents and purposes no representation in congress that is able to move the needle so can be safely ignored. It's just the rich making themselves richer, one group going about that slightly more nuanced than the other.

And if the libertarians would be represented in congress in numbers that could move the needle the rich would be making themselves richer even quicker.