traineeinvestor
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
The Economic Mobility Project recently asked people what was more important, reducing inequality or ensuring that everyone has a fair chance at improving their economic standing. More than 60 percent "strongly" felt opportunity was more important, while just 16 percent felt strongly about reducing inequality.
If you have to choose, I'd vote for opportunity as being more important than reducing inequality as well.
That said, given correlations between educational achievement and income levels, the seemingly unending escalation of the cost of education may be having an impact at both ends. (The obvious exceptions to this are the entreprenurial types who manage to take advantage of the ease of starting a new business using the internet and other low cost technology.)
As an aside, I'm often struck by the fact that many of those argueing for action taken to reduce fiscal inequality (i) ignore the fact that the "rich" pay most of the taxes already and (ii) most of the the "rich" aren't rich enough to be hot with enough additional taxes to make a material difference and (iii) that in absolute terms poverty has declined a lot over the last 50-60 years and (iv) over the last 20-30 years, on a global basis there has been a huge increase in the number of people who have joined the middle class (nothwithstanding the problems the middle class faces in some developed markets).