Your posts are consistently well written and insightful. You foresaw better than most the events that unfolded over the last several months. Kudos to you.
In this post, you channelled your inner Pollyanna. Mostly, politics is a zero-sum game where political factions compete for the largest piece of pie. The idea of raising up everyone is laudable, but it rarely occurs, and attempts to help everyone have failed here in the US because the strategy for implementation has been poor.
In game theory, if your strategy is cooperation, and your opponent's strategy is to maximize their advantage, you are going to end up with the smaller piece of pie. Run that forward through many, many cycles like we have here in the US, and you have the enormous disparity where the self-maximizing parties end up with all the resources. This is a strategic failure on the part of those who want to expand social services.
In short, the political tack you are advocating is a losing idea, a recipe for continued imbalance and even more wealth accumulation by the side trying to maximize the benefits for themselves.
The political right in American figured this out years ago, and they exploited this strategy of self-maximization at the expense of others for the last 40 years. The political left foolishly appeased this strategy at every turn. Other than the Affordable Care Act, there hasn't been a meaningful pushback against the selfish interests of capital in the last 40 years, and even after that passed, the political right spent 8 years trying to dismantle it even though is was popular among the electorate.
The problem isn't a lack of empathy. Americans are not heartless assholes. The problem is that the political left has a poor political strategy and an unwillingness to embrace the politics of power to take back the resources accumulated by the political right. Redistribution of wealth through taxation is anathema to the political right, and for the last 40 years, the political left has had no appetite for it either: thus we have the biggest wealth disparity since the 19th century.
Until the political left embraces Thomas Piketty and starts taxing wealth more heavily, our wealth disparity will get worse, and so will all the problems you describe in your post.
