Last year, a Gallup survey found that only 45% of young adults in the United States have a favorable view of capitalism, while 51% see socialism in a positive light. Among all US adults, only 56% gave capitalism a positive rating, the lowest since 2010.
Which is why those claiming that Trump will succeed by yelling "socialism, socialism!" against Bernie and the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists are dinosaurs.
The people who are still gung-ho for capitalism and actually scared of social welfare are the same ones who been in the bag for Trump and are mostly old people who are going to vote regardless. Outside of old white people and pro-business fanatics no one is shook by those scare tactics anymore.
What is an acceptable level of "income inequality"?
Inequality is too high when....
* People become wealthy enough to effectively control the legislative and regulatory processes that are supposed to keep them in check
* People become wealthy enough to effectively deny opportunity to others
* People become wealthy enough to meaningfully limit economic mobility
* People become wealthy enough that they make more money simply via their control of capital than they could through productive work
If the 1% of the ultra-wealthy have more control over government than the 80% of the poor and middle class, there is obviously something wrong. If a single corporation like Walmart can decide whether hundreds of thousands of small enterprises across the country stay in business or not, there's obviously something wrong. When the worst-performing children of the rich are more likely to graduate college than the best-performing children of the poor, there's obviously something wrong.
Exactly what level does this occur at? It would vary depending on many factors in the individual society. I'm an extremist of course, but I would be very happy with a society in which the highest-paid person made no more than 5x as much as any other fully-employed person. Before performing a thought experiment about such a society, consider that without the out-of-control ballooning of dispensable income by the rich but with the enormously grown income base of the poor and working class, many luxury goods would drop significantly in price and property especially would become far more affordable.