Comment by dkural

People need a variety of goods from society, like security, healthcare, education, a way to settle disputes via law as opposed to might; etc. American inequality is not just about money or shares. Racial segregation is enforced by the unique system of local taxes funding local schools an erecting barriers for poor people to both move in and access good education. This was intentionally and purposefully set up as a means of segregation - i.e. deny black people from entering white communities and access the same social goods.

One basic suggestion is to pool all public education dollars at a larger unit, and distribute across all schools in a given state equitably. Eventually all public schools in a given state will have similar quality, and more importantly, the upper middle classes will now put their considerable resources and energy to improving the whole state system instead of their idyllic town, lifting up the standards across the whole state.

Of course people will be upset about their property values - in fact, that's when you begin to see the true proportions of American social division: People have equity built up in segregation. They bought in to the system.

Many countries have roughly comparable public schools across groups of a couple million people. It is not tiny districts with massive disparities across one another.

Another idea is national health care - the US Government already pays for most of the actual costs: Veterans, active-duty military, Children in need, the poor, and the majority of elderly Americans. These constitute most of the actual costs. The government also pays indirectly through healthcare benefits provided to roughly 1/3rd of America employed via various levels of government (state, fed, local) and government-run entities (like subways, school etc.).

So - the gov pays for the sick people, whereas the healthy working age people pay into insurance. So the costs come out of gov, but the $ goes to private.

We also have massive inefficiency maintaining bureaucracies in hospitals, government, and insurance companies to do billing. Europeans are shocked at just how much of the healthcare $ is spent on this staff, that is more than half of all staff. You can fire every single person doing reimbursements and billing if you had a nationalized healthcare system. You can also remove perverse incentives to docs, who make money by treating you unnecessarily. When Doc has college bills to pay for little junior, you're GETTING that stent, need it or not.