I don't know about you, but it kind of galls me when I see and read of folk who find some need to "protest" against those who are wealthy, and also have this ongoing reference and dreary debate about that "ever widening income gap" !!
I can't tell from this piece just how serious you are but, assuming you are, here are a couple or three quick thoughts.
1. The "wealthy" often try to frame the issue as one about "shame" but it misses the point. It's rather about the kind of society we want to have and what patterns of inequality foster/inhibit it. The general preferred notion is that the best society is one with a flourishing and growing middle class, with strong connections to political power, and the strongest possible avenues of upward mobility into it and upward out of it. Growing inequality of income and wealth, of the sort we now see, diminishes that. Evidence abounds to support that argument.
2. If you have in mind de Blasio's proposals to tax the very wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for early education for kids, then it's something specific to discuss--whether to do it, whether doing so improves the lives of the poor by offering more opportunity, and whether a tax on the wealthy is the best way to pay for it. I'm a big supporter of de Blasio's proposals because I think early childhood education works, is tax dollars extremely well spent, and because the wealthy have grown much more wealthy in recent years and can best afford to provide the tax dollars for such.
3. Rumbling around in all of this is one's conception of the role of government in fostering a "good" society. |
