Yeah, sorry about that. Neurotic lately, but with decent results. Not on Hubski though. Any means that quells the Rage of The People will usually help society return to a more functional state, I guess. The Rage can be a reaction to anything, real or perceived. Scary, in this intellectual landscape. Public opinion has become increasingly hostile towards elites, but is not yet trending towards any tipping point, imho. Most people are still content to blame others only marginally lower or higher than themselves on the socioeconomic ladder. The only required signal, across perhaps 85% of society, invoking what I would sometimes classify as a primal response, is the R or the D next to a name (the recent campaign to affiliate "D" with "dick" being a conspiracy executed by the occult group of your mom, I saw it on YouBoob). I think we should still try to fight the extreme party loyalty mentality, even if you're goddamn sure that you've made the better choice. As a stupidly naive child*, I'm entitled to think that demonstrating moderatism/tempered scientism in my daily life could help hasten the onset of the inevitable class warfare. I fuck up a lot, but hey, it's a conscious goal. Like I've ranted elsewhere around here all too recently, I'm of the mind that it's best to confront existing problems before they grow even larger, so that's why I whine. I sincerely hope that it doesn't require a cataclysmic event to jolt the middle class awake. But it looks like we're headed that way, somehow or another, and I haven't found many people to disagree on that; only on what the disaster will be and who to blame. The People will eventually and inevitably turn against the elites, I agree. It's difficult to imagine what form the battlefield might take, because it's difficult to predict when it will happen. * My sister recently went from saying, "I'm just a child, how could you hold me responsible??..." to "If you would just step back and leave me alone, I'm a mature adult, very well capable of my independence..." within the same argument. I thought that was fantastic, so I'm stealing it. And it's OK, to steal things, when you're such an old, old guy, like me.Your addendum
Violent wealth redistribution is pretty good for the middle class
Piketty
I think the fact that we got through the depression without too many shots fired (Upton Sinclair be damned) is an indication that we're still in a place where gradual, gentle change can accomplish everything we need. And by "gentle" I mean "nobody gets their lives rekt." Trump wants to knock that 40% down to 15%. It makes the counterproposal of kicking it back up to 65% seem damn near reasonable by comparison. That top rate? It applies to people earning more than $400k. Trump wants to save 'em $100k (minimum) a year. Kicking it the other way would cost 'em $200k (minimum) a year. Yeah - larcenous. Yeah - confiscatory. But fuckin'A son you still got $200k a year.
I'm trained to read the captions before clicking on a figure, I guess, and when I read "Trump wants to knock that 40% down to 15%" below a thumbnail'd line plot, my first instinct was that you were talking about his approval rating. Before I could realize that I'd made a mistake, my kneejerk reaction was "ha, YEAH he does", and I figured that you were about to build a decent case for it. lol. I had no idea the wealthy were taxed so heavily during/after the great depression. Obviously, they found some tax loopholes and were able to make sure the trickle down effect was still going on, otherwise we would've failed to recover. Reductionism bundled into a joke, hilarious. Higher estate taxes for the extreme upper echelons, anyone? Seems like a no-brainer. Nobody needs to wake up one day with 100 million more dollars, that seems kinda stupid*. Unless the estate was worth, say, 10 billion dollars. Even then, it's kinda weird to me. And Trump's new tax plan eliminates the estate tax, of course. * of course, I would be willing to make exceptions, but fuck all of this Cayman-island-Swiss-bank-wealth-hoarding bullshit.