> Guess what: if the world is going to improve for poor people then we rich people are going to have to forgo some luxuries; reagonomics/"rising tide raises all ships" doesn't work (how well are the poor people in SF doing?).

How does rich people forgoing luxuries help poor people? Moreover, the poor people in SF are doing a hell of a lot better than many parts of the world. I lived in Africa for two years and a minimum wage worker in the US would be considered almost unimaginably wealthy.

Poor is relative, and the working class in America would be doing great if not for the massive inflation in college, housing, and healthcare prices. And what do all three have in common? You guessed it, the government! It should be no surprise to anyone that the natural result of pumping absurd amounts of money into these sectors (student loans, government subsidized mortgages, medicare/medicaid) is inflated prices.

I think if the world is going to improve for poor people, then individuals who aren't poor are going to have to learn how to not oversimplify reality into simplistic narratives for their own mental comfort. If you admit that reagonomic "rising tide rise all ships" rhetoric is structurally flawed (which is certainly true), then I think you can probably make the next step towards understanding that unless you have four commas in your bank account, you do not have enough clout to change the structure of the current socioeconomic system. And from there, you can probably make the next step towards understanding that it's built that way for a reason, that the hierarchical aggregation of socioeconomic capital towards the top of the hierarchy was designed intentionally.