“I understand why people are loth to give ‘something for nothing’”

Bruce, I have been paying a ton of taxes for 40 years, so I am already giving much more than “something”. And I am confident that I will never see the money that I put in — it will be — has been — distributed to others already.

BTW, I am in the 1%, but I am not rich. My wife and I rent a townhouse, and drive economy cars. We don’t have enough saved to retire. The problem is, in our area (northern Virginia), one has to be in the 1% to just get by. We used to own a home — not a large one at all, just standard size — and the mortgage was $5200/month. It got to be too much. $1000 of that monthly payment was property taxes.

The 1% are not the rich: they are working urban/suburban professionals who are up in years and are raising or have raised a family — people who are senior in their profession by now, but not rich. They are not, by and large, accumulating wealth. The rich are the 0.1%. I see a-lot of them around: they live in Great Falls, and they come to shop at our Whole Foods in their Maseratis and Bentleys. They live in McMansions that look like Downton Abbey. A friend of mine is one of those: their house is at least 10,000 square feet. His wife is a CEO of startups that she invests in. But they are way beyond 1%. I am the 1%, and when I visit him, I pull up in my little Subaru Crosstrek.

I wish I were rich. Then I could retire and go back to finish my PhD. That is what I would really like to do, but I can’t afford to do that. I am in the 1%, but in the place where we live — which is near my clients — my income is just enough to rent a townhouse and maintain a cheap car.

So when people talk about expanding Federal social programs, which would inevitably increase my taxes, I get very anxious. I already cannot save enough. If my taxes increases any more, I will have to work the rest of my life, or move into a trailer.

Population is the elephant in the room, but there is no political interest in that issue. And the national narrative is almost entirely driven by what each of the two political parties choose as a wedge issue.

Yes, we need the hierarchy of government that we have, but too much of the responsibility for governance has moved to the Federal level, where it is far removed from people, and the Federal government is like a big candy store for special interests. Witness how it has evolved: it is completely broken, and no election will fix it. Unless we change the system, such as by instituting rank choice voting, it will stay broken. At this point, I don’t want the Federal government to do anything more — I want it to do less, because whatever it does today is a disaster.

I don’t know about the fluidity that you talk about. People thought the Internet would lead to that, but it did not take long for special interests to grab control of that platform. Today, the only voices that get heard on the Internet are the ones that pay enough, or the ones that happen to strike a cord and get lucky. By and large, it is a pay-to-play system.

Sorry to be so negative.