Bret Devereaux

Disagreement over issues like a border wall (which as a purely physical object is largely an empty symbol; on the deeper substance of immigration/border policy, Dems like Obama and Biden aren't necessarily less hawkish than Trump) is still more the symptom than the disease here

Im thinking more about spiraling inequality and stagnating economic prospects for ever larger majorities of the population, which Biden & co are fairly open about wanting to do pretty much nothing to fix

Interesting you'd have Murray Rothbard in your name, then. The stats there are interesting if you dig deep. A ton of it just boils down to how health insurance works. Total compensation inequality hasn't gone up much, but because so much is insurance, wage inequality is rising.

The economic prospects seem to divide into three basic groups. 1) Big cities - elites only, because their housing prices are lethal to normal people. 2) The sticks - cheap, but no jobs. The only self-respect left is for farmers. (continued)

3) Suburbs and smaller cities. This is where normies live, because you actually can. But the commute is often a killer, and you wind up in an insane rat race for university for your kids.

IMO, the easiest one to fix is universities. Why on earth do they cost eight zillion dollars per semester? Why are they mandatory to become a burger-flipper? Push people away from them - not so much individuals, but HR departments and hiring managers.

They should still exist, of course - education is important, and useful or outright necessary for some. But we don't need to make the median kid start work four years later, a hundred grand in the hole, in order to be able to hope for a middle-class life. That's madness.

Higher ed costs are a problem, but the big one affecting a larger majority of the US population right now is skyrocketing healthcare costs, which are a direct consequence of our insane private/employer insurance model that the Dems' big flagship healthcare bill declined to touch