[ToBeFair]

Originally Posted by iDumb
You do not need equal opportunities for everyone. That is an idealistic world view. You just need enough opportunities for social mobility. It's a step by step process. After that social mobility, your kids can be "more privileged" than you.

At a basic level, there has to be equal opportunity for EVERYONE. Food, shelter, healthcare, and education - these are the bare minimum. Of course, the rich kid will have other advantages due to being rich - and no one is taking those away from him or her.

Also what do you mean by 'enough opportunity'? How do you tangibly define 'enough'?

Also, am I being idealistic? Probably yes. As a politician, you must be bold, idealistic, and visionary. I heard somewhere in a talk show, "there is nothing pragmatic about incremental solution to a catastrophic problem." You must aim for the highest. This is what the early caliphs of Islam used to be like. Caliph Umar used to be fearful thinking that he would be responsible to God on the Day of Judgment even if a stray camel remains hungry in a remote desert.

And this is what a government is supposed to be. Collectively it is supposed to be the guardian of each and every citizen, and more importantly, the guardian of the poor, the needy, the helpless, and the common mass.

United States offers wide variety of quality educational institutions and many financial aids and loans for you to get your education. It is your choice how you want to proceed. Access is and was never a problem. You can unleash all that potential with the resources that you have. Why does every college need to be free at the expense of tax payers money?

The devil is in the detail. Access to college is available but in exchange for life long student loan. This is nothing but another trick from the bankers. Load students with debt such that they keep repaying it until they are in their 50s. This is predatory capitalism. As Dr. Jill Stein repeatedly campaigned in 2016, student loan debt restrained a huge amount of human potential and creativity that otherwise could be unleashed through abolishing all student loan debts and starting free college.

Of course, free college will not eliminate private colleges. Private colleges can coexist alongside government funded free colleges. If capitalism is all about choices, why is capitalism so allergic to anything government funded? Don't they like competition/choice?

Affordable home is also geography dependent. Move if u can't afford it. There are occasions where I do however believe big corporations have some duty if they are the cause this affordability. Again it should not be a tax payer problem.

It is easy to say move out but it is not practical for millions of people. And yes, shelter might not be a tax payer problem but the government must play a role in keeping the price in check. Otherwise, supply and demand will not control the market price. In many states in US, the ratio of empty homes to homeless people is 5 to 1, and yet the housing price keeps increasing. Why? Because for the top 1%, it makes no difference if those houses remain empty or occupied. Therefore the government must play a role to ensure housing affordability.

Health care is the only sector in this country that needs to be truly free for all imo and needs massive overhaul. you can have a better top notch system and truly free for all than the current inefficient bureaucratic system with the amount of money we spend.

See you had to budge at least in one aspect because you simply could not weasel out and come up with any alternative capitalist argument

Immigrants arriving to USA are not only from countries where US invaded and stole their resources.

And moreover, the outcome from past actions of others are not how I view how I would like to tackle a problem.

Past actions? Do you have gold fish memory or what? What is USA doing to Venezuela now? And the thousands that migrated from Venezuela to its neighboring countries a few months ago happened due to economic sanctions by USA.

It was Hillary Clinton who destroyed Libya. Was it happening in medieval ages?

Rohingya crisis? Is it not man made?

Economic migration has been happening since the time of Adam. It never causes problem or crisis. It is a natural phenomenon. However, when migrations happens due to man-made causes, it creates crisis. Seems you are simply unwilling to look at the root cause.

When it comes to tax revenue, the majority will come from majority of the regular ppl. Taxing One billionarie 90 percent will only get u 900 million in revenue but tax 1 million ppl with 100k income at 10% - u get 1 billion. Whose tax do u think will be targeted for increased revenues?? It will sound great to tax the billionaire even higher but reality is the increased tax falls on regular folks. So it is me and you the hard worker who will be subsidizing for the equal opportunities for children of your food stamp using neighbor.

Don't buy into the right wing propaganda. Are you even aware of the magnitude of income/wealth inequality? Do you really believe that corporations are paying fair share of taxes? See few examples below of income inequality:

Here are just a few facts about what is going on inside these corporations:

During the first four months of this year, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his wealth increase by $275m – every single day. Bezos makes more wealth in 10 seconds than the median Amazon employee makes in a year. While Amazon paid no federal income taxes last year, it has been reported that one out of three Amazon workers in Arizona and 2,400 of its workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio rely on food stamps to feed their families.

Disney made $9bn in profits last year and gave its CEO Robert Iger a four-year compensation package worth up to $423m. Meanwhile, almost three-quarters of Disneyland workers say they don’t earn enough money to cover basic expenses every month, more than two-thirds are food insecure and more than one out of 10 report having been homeless over the last two years.

The average cashier at McDonald’s would have to work over 895 years to make what the company’s CEO, Steve Easterbrook, earns in one year. While McDonald’s had enough money to reward its wealthy shareholders with $7.7bn in stock buybacks and dividends, it reneged on a commitment it made to its low-wage workers to pay them at least $1 an hour above the local minimum wage.

US taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s low wages to the tune of at least $6.2bn each and every year. That makes the Walton family of Walmart, the wealthiest family in America, the largest welfare recipient in the country. Over the past five years, Walmart made over $70bn in profits and paid its CEO Doug McMillon nearly $23m last year – 1,188 times more than its median employee.

American Airlines is using $2bn of its profits over the next two years on stock buybacks and will pay its CEO, Doug Parker, up to $31m in total compensation this year. Meanwhile, many of its ticket agents at Envoy Air make as little as $9.48 an hour, forcing many of them to rely on taxpayer assistance to make ends meet.

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