I think you are seeing this through European eyes. This is the kind of thing that gets you yelled at, threatened and told you're the "kind of [people] ruining america" if you talk about it in the US.

It's not controversial among people who are educated in the subject, but among the general amerian public it's incredibly controversial.

The problem is that the feedback loop between US and Europe ends up being very unbalanced: American thinkers are hugely influential in Europe, but European ones get disqualified in the US almost by default because they're "socialists". This is a problem for us Europeans as much as for you.

They aren't disqualified by any thinkers you would want to listen to, but yes, in general they are.

Americans, in broadly general terms, aren't interested in non-American things. Or intellectual anything. So yeah, combine those two together and you get the worst of those two general trends.

I was shocked how hard it is to find any books about ordoliberalism in North America, even though it was a driver of economic thought and policy in Germany for decades.

The only book I found was at a major university's library, in German.

It was a "WTF" moment.

The thing is, even if you ask the rich to pay more in taxes, that doesn't go to poor people. It goes to the government.

If you want poor people to get richer, tax them less (or remove them from tax altogether). Don't re-circulate the money via self-interested politicians to waste.