The surest sign that the right has accepted climate change is that they’ve begun building spaceships.
I whole heartedly disagree with this. When the public education system is broken and sees no hope of getting better, then it’s a bad investment of our taxes that go to fund it. Even when I send my kids to private schools, I am still paying taxes that go toward our public education system. I don’t like paying taxes to go towards broken programs.
Roughly 15% of US students attend privates schools. It’s a good assumption that those parents that are sending those 15% of students to private schools and paying property taxes alongside their private tuition, are paying a disporportionate amount (meaning greater than 15%) of property taxes, as they probably live in more expensive homes and thus a higher % of property taxes.
If the school system contines to lag, it becomes less efficient and costs will continue to accelerate. Even if the American elite that send their kids to private school believe they aren’t affected they don’t represent a large enough voting % to vote down any increases in levy’s to fix the public schools.
The group that does represent a significant voting block toward increasing property taxes isn’t the parent of private school students, but the empty nesters and retired people, who no longer have school aged children (even if they aren’t wealthy) and don’t like paying taxes that themselves no longer receive any benefit from.
It’s how people think. That doesn’t mean it actually reflects reality. But I do believe the wealthier people get, the more they try to distance themselves from the “common folk”, both geographically and economically. You don’t even need to build a wall. Just make it so expensive that ordinary people can’t afford to live there.
I feel there’s a couple of shaky premises in your argument.
The first is that our public education system is inherently broken and has no hope of getting better. I disagree. I feel that a large share of public schools problems are fixable and could be solved with increased funding.
The second shaky premise is that people pay an amount of taxes that is proportionate to their wealth. All the evidence indicates otherwise. As people get wealthier, they gain the power to create and take advantages of ways to minimize the taxes they pay.
Nitpick: College isn’t part of the US’s legally mandated universal education system. Leaving public primary and secondary schools underfunded and struggling is unethical mostly because so many kids have to go to them. Nobody is legally required to go to college.
Another nitpick: AFAICT the average public university is much more competitive with the average private college, in terms of academic prestige and educational quality, than the average (elementary or secondary) public school is with the average private school. I know plenty of college students from families affluent enough to send them to a private college, who chose to attend a state school instead because it gave them more opportunities for what they wanted to study. So college selection is not really a very apt example of elite class segregation.
A larger? (Part of the problem?) I fit in this category as well. But IMHO the problem really is the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezozes of the world. The difference is that those of us in this category are, as you mention, contributing to society by our work in law, pharma, medicine, tech, or whatever. The pay we bring home is from our own labor, which society benefits from. Even the very top end entertainers like Taylor Swift, Patrick Mahomes, or Tom Cruise, are earning their money through benefiting society via their labor. It’s just that entertainers get the benefit of their labor being leveraged by the internet, where most other professions are unable to do so due to the nature of their job. It’s the owners whose “labor” is limited to signing paychecks who should be doing the heavy lifting. Unlike the professionals making six figures, they can easily contribute more without having to reduce their standard of living.
For many of them this would be an artifact of the system that makes their position possible, but not secure. There are those in the “Upper Middle” Class who experience a perverse transposition of the paycheck-to-paycheck phenomenon: As opposed to the working class who are payday-to-payday away from destitution, these UMC worry about being account-statement-to-account-statement away from living at a large net loss, not being able to sustain their higher obligations and expenses and falling off the UMC into a socioeconomic tailspin. They depend on their investment package (in the private stock market) to stay growing and their home appreciating (in the market, again) to have enough cashable assets to prevent, e.g., some major health incident crushing them. They depend on placing the kids into a “Good School” to give them a head start, because there’s no placing them as execs in the company.
Musk and Bezos are perhaps not the best examples, as they started companies that are now worth billions of dollars. But I often question how much actual “work” upper level executives actually do. Especially in large established companies. In a sense, is Elon Musk “performing” as the head of Space X and his other companies any better or worst than Tom Cruise performing in another Mission Impossible film?
But sure, super wealth people should pay proportionately more taxes than those who make less. The problem is that being that wealthy gives you a lot more options for hiding that wealth from the tax man.
What irritates me are a number of people I know with a more libertarian bent who think they shouldn’t have to pay taxes at all.
I think it’s more due to the fact that the upper middle class has the means to live in nicer communities, but not sufficient means as the mega wealth to simply build whatever community they want.
Also I think most of us feel we have to work pretty hard just to earn a little bit extra. So we tend to get resentful when well-meaning people try to take some of that away in the interest of “fairness” or whatever.
This is what elites have been trying to pull off forever, man.
It is easy to forget how fairly recent the idea of genuine equality is - I mean, it was really, really progressive as recently as, say, 1900 to think that poor people weren’t poor just because they were intrinsically inferior. The UK was well into parliamentary democracy while it still did not allow working class people to enter parks in London.
The relatively high level of common equality we saw in the West after 1945, and the propensity of the truly rich to be a bit modest in their presentation of it, was until pretty recently really quite unusual.