The "middle class" is a post industrial revolution concept; there was no feudal middle class; the concept is a creation of capitalist production. If there is no capitalism, there will be no middle class, but more subtly, if there is no production in an economic society, there will be no middle class. The 'inequality' complained of here is a result of declining domestic production which was brought on over the past 30 years by a fiscal context that discouraged domestic investment over domestic consumption. This middle class destructive fiscal context reached its apex under President Obama. With all the socialist and income inequality rhetoric the last eight years only saw an acceleration of production running away from America and a worsening income inequality metric. What we need to do to help America (capitalism doesn't need help, it will move if you are not nice to it) is encourage domestic investment by reducing tax and regulation on investment; this is more important than reducing taxes generally, or reducing individual taxes, or reducing taxes on the 'middle class.' All those other tax reductions are merely feel good Keynesian sops that will not help; that will not produce wage growth for domestic workers. Because we can't ignore the needs of an 'underclass' of unemployables that we have created though dysfunctional progressive policies, and we must provide for domestic security in a still hostile world, and because we have squandered so much in government borrowing that was never invested in anything that could pay back the debt, we do need gov't revenues. That is why it is important that tax reduction be focused in ways that encourage production; this may seem unfair and unequal, but it is the only thing that will provide a basis to work out of this mess.
This is wrong. People don't have crap lives, they are just unsatisfied with their lives. They have more stuff than generations before and are still not satisfied simply because there is more stuff to want. A while ago I saw a documentary about this family in the Philippines. The family lived on a small island with no running water. The kids seemed happy enough with their life even though it would be considered hard by our standards. For example, the father wakes up early, goes fishing, comes home and gives some fish to the kids to sell before they go to school. They paddle a boat for 1 hour to the main island(where the school is), sell the fish on the walk to school so they have a little bit of money (like 50 cents). Then when school is over, they go fill up water containers and paddle the boat home. Later on in the documentary, the filmmakers ask why he(the father) doesn't move his family closer to a big town where they wouldnt have such a hard life. His answer was he didn't want to do that because his kids would see all sorts of things they wanted and they would get sad because he couldn't afford to buy it for them. He said it's better that they don't know that stuff exists so it doesn't make them unhappy to not have it.
When all these new millions of unemployed are a big problem will the Govt. institute a compulsory or a voluntary 2 working day week job sharing for instance ? Or pay people not to work and try and do something else like start a business, write songs, become tour guides etc. ? Maybe start a sanatorium for burnt out traders to recuperate in.
If there aren't enough jobs, there won't be enough consumers, and there won't be profits. They'll need redistribution through UBI to keep the system going.
Wait a minute! If it is OK to privatize prisons, what's wrong with privatizing welfare? Oops, I think I just figured out the answer to the question! When welfare is government, my workers are sudsidized by you; but if welfare is privatized, I'll have to subsidize my own workers. That would suck. THat would really suck "bigly"!
Indeed. If fulltime minimum wage didn't require supplementary income, it would cost less tax dollars to support those who need welfare on top of work. And despite min wage scaremongering, I haven't seen stats yet showing a negative effect on employment in proportion to its positives.