If you have data on GINI after taxes/transfers, I'd love to see it.

Umm, Google, Wikipedia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GiniPlots_USA.png

See also [1] for a list of countries by Gini both before and after taxes/transfers.

But please recognize that you are in a minority here - most left wing sorts don't look at data after taxes and transfers. For example, anyone who talks about poverty is talking about pre-tax/transfer data (after taxes and transfers, poverty is almost nonexistent).

Say what? For example, Germany actually has higher inequality than the US before taxes and transfers, but significantly lower inequality after taxes and transfers [1]. And even egalitarian Finland's pre-tax Gini isn't much different from that of the US (taxes and transfers cut it almost in half). Inequality before taxes and transfers is practically unavoidable in a developed countries; taxes and transfers are the difference between the European social democracies and the US.

And no, poverty is not non-existent after taxes and transfers; about one in six Americans lives in a food-insecure household [2]. Ever been to Gary, IN [3], East St. Louis, or Chicago's South Side? America has not only a high relative poverty rate, but also a high absolute poverty rate (compared to the rest of the developed world).

Also, why do you seem to assume that I'm a "left wing sort" (other than by tea party standards where Rockefeller Republicans are proto-communists)?

You still have not clearly stated what data would falsify your theory. Should I conclude that your claims are unfalsifiable, and therefore closer to a religious claim than a scientific one?

Huh? Just because a random variable that is the aggregate of many other random variables (college enrollment) is not sufficient to make statements about one of the component random variables (college tuition) does not mean that it's unfalsifiable. You do have to control for the other variables, though. But there's nothing inherently unfalsifiable about a relation between tuition and college enrollment/completion. Just because you can't find it easily on Google doesn't mean that you couldn't design a study to examine that relation minus confounding factors. And the evidence is strong that there is such a relation (it's also common sense - if a good becomes more expensive, fewer people will purchase this good, unless there are countervailing effects).

If you look at it more closely, for example, you will learn that income affects college graduation rates and college degree attainment rates (and, conversely, having a college degree affects income and social mobility) [4]. Higher tuition both negatively affects graduation rates and also segregates low-income students into lower quality colleges (or kept out of college entirely). The underlying paper by Bailey and Dynarski [5] documents pretty clearly that income inequality translates into inequality in educational attainment and that low-income students dropping out disproportionately often is a major driver of this effect.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...

[2] http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/hun...

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-indiana-photos-2012-7

[4] http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/

[5] http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/Bailey_Dynarski.pdf