Pen's Parade graphic, it's interesting.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/coma/images/issues/200609/Height.jpg

The issue should not be income inequality, but can anyone create wealth and better their lot in life? And the answer, in the US for now at least, is still yes.

As Crid pointed out in an earlier thread with a PJ O'Rourke quote, wealth is not a fixed value, like a pie in which one can get more only by denying others an equal share. It's more like everyone getting a pile of dough and some using to make various types of bread, some of which are more in-demand than others.

We can all start out with a $1,000,000 loan, like Donald Trump, and by the end of a decade, some of us will be broke while others will be multimillionaires. Did those multimillionaires "steal" the others' millions? Probably not. At least they wouldn't have to in order to multiply their wealth.

Americans, in general, do not take advantage of the wealth-building vehicles available of them. According to Motley Fool, 79% of Americans work for a company offering a 401K, yet only 32% of Americans have a 401K. Many who do have one do not take full advantage of the employer match - that's free money folks.

There are still other ways to build wealth available to the majority of Americans - buying a house, opening or joining an investment fund, cutting expenses to save money, getting an education to build salable skills, buying gold coins, etc.

The stock market is one of the best ways to build long-term wealth, despite its ups and downs. According to Warren Buffett, "Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a fly epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497."

Communist and socialist countries do not have stock markets, as their concept of "publicly owned companies" is government-controlled companies. No one but the government gets rich off of those. (see China, Red)

Some of my new neighbors -- like tech honchos -- earn vastly more money than I do (per their giant new homes and the Teslas plugged in out back). This is not some horrible thing ("inequality"!). It's just a fact.

If you owned, this would be fabulous for you. The arrivistes drive up housing values and California's Prop 13 keeps your property taxes within reach.

Prop 13 is far from the bete noir the progressives would have you believe. It can be a godsend as you get older. My uncle lives in an area in which housing prices have risen dramatically in the last few decades. He bought an older post-war cottage in the '70s for a pittance in today's money. Now, his house is tax-valued at over $1,000,000. Without Prop 13 like protections, his property taxes have risen to meet that valuation. He's 88 and living on his savings (considerable) and his fixed income (not so considerable as he retired early due to health). Sadly, once he's gone, that quaint little cottage will be sold and razed for a McMansion - as so many of his neighbors' houses were.

Not one measure to limit wealth has ever made it easier for others to get there. Those measures buy votes for the politician promising "equality" - when there is no such thing.

These are actual lawyers? lawyers who seem to be unfamiliar with the takings' clause? All the Democrats needed to do was stay relatively sane in this election cycle. And they can't even do that.

And like good politicians, they have no intention of carrying that out. Because if they do, then there is no incentive for anyone to develop, test and bring to market new drugs.

None. Free market. How does that work?

The issue is that America is approaching a third world style country where a few people live in luxury behind gates and the rest of us live in favelas.

Take immigration. Rich people lobby to open the boarders up in America and increase the supply of labor and thus lower wages and thus make it harder to join the middle class. All your libertarianism amounts to is telling the little guy not to use the state in his favor while ignoring that big business is using the state to crush him.

Like didn’t you go to Michigan Amy? I mean if you don’t have personal experience with this you should have a high enough IQ to understand that middle class Americans are starting to worry that their children won’t join the middle class. And they’re right to worry.

Jamal DeMarcus: "...America is approaching a third world style country where a few people live in luxury behind gates and the rest of us live in favelas..."
"All your libertarianism amounts to is telling the little guy not to use the state in his favor while ignoring that big business is using the state to crush him."
"...middle class Americans are starting to worry that their children won’t join the middle class."

Good points.

I've wondered if homeless camps and government housing will be the seeds of an American version of favelas.

Collectivism means the individual no longer matters; the collective good over-rides everything; and the most horrible abuses can be justified as "for the people" or "for the state" or "for the worker."

That easy justification is one reason collectivist societies always devolve into totalitarianism:

• Revolutionary France
• Soviet Russia
• Nazi Germany
• Falangist Spain
• Fascist Italy
• Peronist Argentina
• Pinochet's Chile
• the Khmer Rouge's Laos
• Maoist China
• Baathist Iraq
• Castro-ite Cuba
• Sandinista Nicaragua
• Afghanistan under the Taliban

Elizabeth Warren, in her seizing of patents, sounds like a schoolmarm version of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

Elect enough people like her, and drifts of American currency, rendered useless, will line the gutters of DC, just as drifts of bolivar notes line the gutters of Caracas. #hyperinflation

I don't care how much money you have, I just care how much you pervert our republic with it.

Other than that, roll yourself in blow while an escort calls you 'sugar donut' for all I care.

And by "yourself" I mean "billionaires" and by "blow" I mean cocaine and by "for all I care" I mean I don't.

Kamala has, what, 50 people in there and it's newsworthy?

Sanders wants to confiscate corporate stocks and give them to workers. It is ordinary people who have their pension and 401k in stocks that would get hit by this.

The gov "taking" stuff because they can is gangster government. In the 1600s and after, the only place in Europe where the king could not just take money from the banks to pay for wars or palaces was England, and thus London became the financial capital of Europe. See how that works? Cities that take your house because you owe $10 in taxes are nothing but thugs. Warren shows herself to be a thug.

The only way (absent gov favors) to get rich is to do things cheaper than other companies or provide a fantastic service or product that people will stand in line for. No leftists complain that Marvel movies make too much because it is totally worth the ticket price. No leftists complain about Apple having 23% profit margins because they love Macs and iPhones. Rich people do not harm me by having a bigger house than me. Do I harm them by having more friends than they do?

"Yes, we can do that! We just need the will to do that."

Yep, and that is why we have the Second Amendment - to keep the government thieves from taking what is rightly mine.