Keeping Up with the Joneses

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
-Emma Lazarus

We, the people, have this expectation that by now we should have this have-have not issue sorted out by now. The truth is American life has become so compartmentalized, gated, isolated, stratified, segmented, and cocooned, two statues within close proximity of each other in New York City can have two very different takes on the concept of opportunity. I am referring to the Charging Bull on Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor. The practices of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman-Sachs, and the poetry of Emma Lazarus are worlds apart. The land of opportunity has become the land for opportunists. The opportunists, if given a chance, will own everything; we, the people, will own nothing.
At this point in American history the Wall Street opportunists see developing markets abroad, cheap labor abroad, and could care less about what happens to the American people. The American people have nothing to do with Wall Street's self-interests unless the American people can make them richer. When they can't, the Wall Streeters and their ilk turn elsewhere. Their loyalty is to their own increasing wealth. It's all about making money, never mind the tired and poor left behind.
Yes, a segment of America has gotten fat, tired, lazy, and entitled. Yes, keeping up with the Joneses has turned into keeping up with the Dow Joneses. We also became a vigilante consumer culture: buy now, ask questions later. The poor, who have nothing but TV to inform them, are conditioned to buy-buy-buy even when they have no purchasing power. However, there are those who have tried their best and still have failed. They are the ones who need help from somewhere.
If our culture and its chief agency, namely government, could better distribute opportunity rather than wealth, that would go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Affirmative correction has done that for some individuals, but the effort has to be orchestrated for whole communities, not just individuals. It does no good to remove a few rough diamonds and polish them, except for the diamonds themselves.
Teach for America is a good start. If businesses can be given tax incentives to hire and train Americans rather than ship jobs overseas, that would be an effective way out. But to rely on more taxation as the means of redistributing wealth simply won't sell. The rich hold the purse-strings of the economy as well as the government, Democrats and Republicans alike. We are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. Therefore, tax break incentives to create and maintain jobs in America are the pragmatic way out of this burgeoning inequality.
Then again, not taxing the rich more than we currently do will leave the growing national deficit a terrible liability for our children’s future. Sooner or later, we'll have to raise taxes. Since 2% of the population earns 24% of the wealth, they should shoulder 24% of the tax burden. Currently they fall far short of that.