I don't understand your stance on weath inequlity.
IMHO, as long as the super wealthy are not hindering those of us in the lower classes from succeeding, where is the harm? Not everyone is going to be successful. Some will and of that group, a few here and there will far exceed successful and fall into the group of the ultra wealthy.
Right now, Musk, Bezos and Gates all made their money by working hard and finding a market that they could exploit. They broke no rules, just hard work and perserverance. their accusition of wealth in no way affected me or my persuit of success. As a matter of fact, I was able to piggy back on Gates's contributions to become successful in my career field.
The lower class poor in this country would be considered rich by may other conutries standards. And while I don't have the luxeries affordable to the billionare class, their having that wealth has not hurt me in the slightest. I don't see the issue.
I agree with most of this and I stated some of it in a post after the one that you quoted.
I don't think the problem is at the top, I think it is at the bottom. The fact that Musk/Bezos/Soros et al have BILLIONS of dollars doesn't hurt the poor in any substantial way.
What I believe DOES hurt the poor is that they are MUCH poorer relative to the middle class than they were 50+ years ago. I believe that there are a multitude of causes for this and a lot of them have little or nothing to do with government. This list is not meant to be everything but it is a few of the big ones:
Knowledge Based Economy:
In a profession like mine (accounting), I am vastly more productive than I could possibly have been in a pre-computer world. I don't have to crunch numbers and do calculations myself because the computer does all of that. All I have to do it set up the spreadsheets and let it do the work. This has made nearly all of the "knowledge based" professionals MUCH more productive than their predecessors from a few generations ago. Engineers on here can do more because they don't actually have to draw the stuff themselves, they just have to set CAD up right and let it go.
The massive productivity increases have been almost exclusively for knowledge based professions and hasn't accrued to more physical professions. Ie, the guy who empties the trash cans in my office is still doing the same function that his predecessor did 50+ years ago, he isn't any more productive than his grandfather.
It doesn't help that accountants and engineers already made more than janitors even 50+ years ago so they were already starting from a higher wage 50+ years ago but now they are vastly more productive while the janitors started off lower and haven't seen the same increases in productivity so they've just fallen further and further behind.
Note that this one is technology-based so it really isn't something that government or social policy could dramatically impact.
Knowledge Based Economy Pt II, impact on labor demand:
Pre-WWII the percentage of American workers with a college degree was in the single digits. Today it is pushing 40%. In spite of that, real wages for the college educated have gone up because the modern economy has a MUCH greater demand for educated workers. Manufacturing processes that used to employ 100's of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers have been automated so that they now employ few if any unskilled or semi-skilled laborers. However, the machines that handle the production need to be designed, managed, maintained, etc. Most of the people doing the design/management/maintenance of those machines are college educated engineers and the like.
In sum this change decreased the demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor while increasing the demand for college educated workers.
The other side of the equation, labor supply:
Immigration policy changed in the 1960's. Additionally, the US became a welfare state. Pre-WWII immigration to the US was exclusively people looking for greater opportunity. Nobody came to the US for handouts in the 1920's because there weren't any handouts to be had. Immigrants still come for opportunity but some also come for handouts. Our system does an atrocious job of prohibiting immigrants here for a handout and it also allows and even encourages unskilled and semi-skilled immigration. This into an economy that ALREADY has a surplus of unskilled and semi-skilled workers for technological reasons outlined above.
Side issue but I want to mention it because it is related to this, disappearing middle-income jobs:
Think of an Accounting or Engineering firm. 50+ years ago they had high paid Accountants/Engineers and low-paid janitorial staff but they also had middle-income bookkeepers/draftsmen. Functionally the Accountants/Engineers oversaw and directed the bookkeepers/draftsmen and the janitorial staff emptied the trash cans and cleaned the toilets. Computers have mostly replaced the middle-income bookkeepers/draftsmen so instead of those firms having high, middle, and low earners, they now mostly only have high and low with an enormous gap in between.
