I did say that the advantage for the handful of poor kids who attend the most prestigious colleges is the best, because the kids from the top 1% have all the advantages that they need, and attending an elite college will rarely provide any additional benefits. However attending an elite college does not put a poor kid on par with a kid from the top 1%.
This a typical red herring for people who attack any attempt at reigning in the wealthy. they immediately start screaming “The Commies Are Coming!!!”. This is fear-mongering which has been used to suppress any attempts by the poorest Americans to get out of poverty.
The fact is that the very wealthiest Americans maintain and increase their wealth by making sure that their profits are high, by keeping labor costs low. This means keeping a large proportion of the people who actually work in poverty - to be able top pay the l;ow wages required for high profits you need to pay low wages, but make sure that the workers have no other choices. Since the the corporate executives hold a lot more power, the only way that the low paid workers can have power is as a group.
So, from the point of view of the executives, any organization which helps the workers work as a group endangers their power and their profits. That is why they vilify any philosophy which encourages organization by workers. That is why they fear and hate anything resembling socialism.
From the 1920s, corporate news and publications have been spending billions on propaganda against any group that provides support for low wage workers at the expense of the power and profits of the wealthiest Americans.
Regarding your claims, most social-democrat countries, such as Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, etc, have a very wealthy 1%, so stop making up your own statistics.
The economic outcomes of social-democratic countries is far better than those of the USA.
Moreover, the so-called “communist” countries were almost never communist, and they also had, and have, a very wealthy top 1% - look at the number of super-wealthy families in China. Most “communist” countries were actually totalitarian dictatorships. The Soviet Union followed its own supposed philosophy no better than the USA has done. China is a country run by its bureaucracy, the same as when it was an empire.
Finally, stop putting words in my mouth - I am NOT your straw man.
The difference between me and the big worshipers of unbridled capitalism is not that I want to get rid of the rich. I don’t. It is that I want to get rid of the poor, while they have a vested interest in keeping a large proportion of the population poor, so as to reduce labor costs, and reduce the power of the low income workers.
I have no problem with the fact that the top 1% have more than 1,000 times the money as the bottom 20%. I have a problem with the fact that they have 1,000,000 times the wealth, and are trying to increase that. I have a problem when the top 1% already own 40% of everything, and are paying to pass laws which will increase that percent. I care when the top 0.1% are putting millions into laws to ensure that they keep on increasing their percent of the economy, and to ensure that the lower income Americans will not get any richer.
I do not care that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet have billions. I care that some of the billionaires are using their money to manipulate the legal system to further increase their money.
Maybe you are either in the top 1%, or have bought into the propaganda that this is the way that it should be in the best of all possible worlds. I have not.
PS. I don’t believe in communism because it cannot work. Not because it is a bad system, but because it only works if every member of society is 100% committed to it. It is very easy to subvert and has no way to protect itself from people who abuse the system, and use it as a way to rise to power and hold it.