Did you consider income inequality to be a problem prior to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011?

And for many, many people it worked.

Tuition rates rose because the government gave out a ton of money, grants, guaranteed loans, so the price didn’t seem to matter much, but in 1975-76 it cost about $7,833 a year for room, board, tuition (adjusted to 2015 dollars) for 2015-16 it ran about $19,548 a year with room, board, tuition, (public collage). Now a person who’s a high school grad with make about $30,000 a year while a college grad would make about $45,000, a non-high school grad $21,000 (all in 2009 dollars).

Now assuming you have 4 year of making nothing while you’re in college that means that person lost out on 120,000 of income and paid about 80,000 to attend college. To break even it will take about 13 years after that they will on average be ahead of the game. Assuming they started either work or college at 18 and continued to until they were 67 your non-high school grad would make just over one million over their working career, a high school grad would make about 1.5 million, while a college grad would make just over 2 million (not counting cost of college but taking into account lost work time).

Now there are many ways to cut the cost of college down, two year at a community college, then transfer to a 4 year college, during which time you could live at home with your parents, you could also do what I did work and go to college at the same time and pay as you go (not fun but I didn’t have loans) rent with roommates and cook yourself. But that’s a different subject.

Now onto low-growth equilibrium (YUNo that’s where there are low levels of per capita income, people are too poor to save and invest much, and this low level of investment results in low rate of growth in national income. Basically means the poor don’t have enough money to invest and thus will stay poor. IE the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich invest while the poor do not.) On a national level we are seeing growth, if you mean just the poor, then yes many don’t have much to invest and while there are some who don’t have an extra dime to invest, but many could invest if they wished too, while maybe not at the rate of a college grad they could invest. You’re not going to fix that with a $15 min wage. That's because in the end they are in the same boat as before.

Let’s take an extreme example say a $50 min wage, or about $100,000 a year, great now nobody is poor, but what about the price of goods. In a very short while the price will rise to take into account the new wage and the poor with will still be paying the same percentage out of their pocket for goods. And that’s assuming that their jobs don’t get automated. If you have a quick sudden rise in wages, it may be cheaper to build a machine to do the job to keep costs down, so in that case the “poor” who manage to find or keep their job would be better off, but the “poor” the machine replaces would be worst oft.

The BEST way is to educate people, teach them how to invest, teach them how to live within their means and still invest. Is it fun, no, is it easy no, is it fun to tell your children no, no. But having come from a very poor background, I can tell you it can be done. I worked my way through college, I know how to cook from scratch (generally the cheapest way to cook) I save for my retirement. Now I don’t have a new car, I don’t have the newest phone (I generally keep my phones for years, I had to replace it last year when it came up missing and bought a $20 phone, which with my usage costs me $15 per month) I don’t buy designer anything. I think about my purchase long and hard. So it can be done.