Ben Shapiro

In fact,

If you look at net taxes, meaning the amount you pay in taxes minus the services you collect from the government, people in the top quintiles pay all tax in the United States.

In 2017, households in the bottom three quintiles collectively received more than $1 trillion in direct government benefits than they paid in all federal taxes that year.

Households in the top 20% pay $1.7 trillion more in taxes than they receive in direct government benefits.

And when it comes to inequality itself,

That, too, is a sort of myth.

The rise of pass-through corporations means that more wealth is reflected on income tax forms than ever before, which makes it look like an explosion of personal income among the top 1%.

But there's an equivalent decline in business income and divided income with that rise.

There's an inevitable problem when the government manages such a large budget.

It doesn't manage it at all.

Objection number two.

It's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps under capitalism.

This is, of course, sheer nonsense.

The myth is that hard work doesn't bridge the gap of someone starting with nothing versus another person starting with wealth, and that individual responsibility is a way for rich people to preach to poor people, but it won't actually help poor people.

Well, here is the thing.

The structural barriers that the left says exist don't actually exist.

A Pew study on the economic advancement of families compared income of parents to that of their children 30 years later, inflation adjusted.

It turns out 93% of children who grew up in the bottom quintile were better off than their parents.

86% of children from the middle three-fifths of the income quintiles grew up to live with higher income than their parents.

70% of children of parents in the top quintile of income were better off than their parents, of the children who grew up in the middle quintiles of income.