Here's Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) on the permanence of wealth disparity in the USA...
The factual: America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances very good are you inherited it.
American wealth is now dynastic, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles' worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg-jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives.
But it's not just that the American rich stay rich – it's that the American poor stay poor. America is a world-trailing loser in the international social mobility league-table. If you change classes in America, chances are you're a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you're a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America's world-beating eviction mills.
As a factual matter, America just isn't the land of bootstraps; it's a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans – and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.
Non-profit groups are huge in this. It lets the rich avoid taxes. Most non-profits spend 90% or more of their funds on "overhead". Overhead is mostly salaries for rich kids who don't want to do a job in the private sector that enriched their parents (or grandparents or whoever made the money). The government does not tax non-profits.
@breadandcircuses@pluralistic yeah my uncle who escaped from socialist Hungary in 1981 to the USA likes to say he bootstrapped himself into middle class conveniently forgetting the Red Cross and his own uncle who got there in 1956 bootstrapping him...