Many arguments have been made re why the rich and the super-rich are paying more taxes than we think, but in the last 20-25 years Republican policies have clearly favoured tax breaks for the them and that's where the bulk of income inequality really got juiced. It's not about envy of those who are more successful; it's funny how when we talk about asshole billionaires Warren Buffett's name never seems to come up. He's the one talking about how he pays less taxes than his secretary, and as we learned a few years ago, Donald Trump paid $750 in his annual taxes a few years ago. I don't know how well-paid Elon Musk's employees are but the conditions at Amazon's warehouses for the rank and file are notoriously bad and underpaid. So while Bezos play with his rocketship, and he's doing it for the coolness factor, not because he's trying to demonstrate safety (only the superrich can afford it anyway), his warehouse people are struggling to make ends meet.

We can blame ourselves for that as well; we've been partly trained by the Walmart mentality to value low prices and ignore sweatshops in the Third World and even in our own land; until recently Walmart was the dirt standard for lousy, shitty pay. But bargain basement prices are now a necessity as wealth funneled from the bottom to the top. My sister-in-law commented to me last year that she and my brother are almost getting to the point where it would be worth it for them to vote Trump, but they won't do that because they have a responsibility to everyone who can't afford a seat at their table. And while they do well for themselves, they're nowhere close to being Bezos, Musk or Trump.

Perhaps raising minimum wage would be a good start, along with bringing back the perks of a job that contributed to how well-off someone was, like affordable healthcare. Since the rich famously hate anyone getting 'government handouts', maybe tax them higher is their employees' salaries don't meet a certain standard; those employees would then quality for a gov't UBI stipend.

It's a complicated subject, but higher wages = higher prices = all boats lifting. Costs would be reduced all around in other, less tangible ways in the forms of lower poverty and crime rates. I'm not interested in 'punishing' people for being successful, but an awful lot of their wealth in recent decades came from tax breaks by Republicans, not because of increased effort, and Darwin knows Bezos has never sweated his ass off in his life. The money flowed upward, much of it unearned; now it's time to reverse some of that, esp since they'll feel a lot less pain than the poor and middle class did.