Why not get explicit about what we mean by fixing income and wealth inequality? Why leave it up to people’s imagination?

It is not taking the rich people’s money and giving it to the poor. It is taking the money the rich people stole from the middle-class and the poor and giving it back to them.

Even the people to whom the money rightfully belongs don’t think they can get it back. Some middle-class people echo the rich people’s meme that if we taxed the rich at 100% and added all the programs that Bernie Sanders wants, that it would leave a deficit.

Apparently nobody is thinking deeply enough or wants to take the effort to explain that this idea of the rich is a fallacy. The rich aren’t taking the money they stole from us as income. They manage to take it as unrealized capital gains. In other words, their wealth is going up because of the stock they own in the companies that are stealing the money. Since the wealthy have so much wealth that they cannot possibly spend all of it, they leave it invested in stocks. Not only is this increase in wealth not taxed, it isn’t even counted as income until the stock is sold. So it looks to the rest of us that there isn’t enough income to tax.

If we unrig the system, those gains go back to the people who earned it. The middle-class and the poor take a much larger fraction of their gain in wealth as income that gets taxed. The middle-class and poor still end up with a lot more money in their pockets to spend even after taxes are collected, because the tax money comes from a fraction of the money they never would have received had we not fixed the system.