PS: One of the odd things is just how poor people used to be. Work minimum wage for 1 week and you can avoid starvation for ~1 year. Yet, people used to regularly starve.
Remember historically most people where poor by our standards. Yes, the things that survive where of high quality, but a lot of junk did not make it. Consider what a 'sod' roof meant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_roof#/media/File:Norskfolk...
Now picture such a thing without modern materials to keep dirt from falling on you. Granted, the floor is often hard pack dirt anyway and done well it's ok. But, again poor and minimally trained.
PS: Sure, if you where rich or competent you could go beyond that standard and there was plenty of high quality stuff made. But, the average farm house, private trail, foot bridge etc... was crap.
Does it? Maybe I'm just cynical but the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy sounds to me like just moving money from one set of rich white guys to another set of rich white guys. I vote one of them in to power at the local elementary school and the other every time I pull out my wallet. I'm not really convinced that either group as a whole spends their money more responsibly.
If we already had a social safety net reform in place, knew how much it was going to cost, and then pushed for higher taxes in order to directly fund the new safety net, that would be different. I think that's what PG meant recently when he said something along the lines of 'focus on poverty, not on income inequality'.