> This really doesn't come off as a problem

It doesn't "come off as" a problem, because that is how you have personally interpreted the situation.

> that needs solving

It doesn't in fact "need" solving - life will go on, one way or another, regardless of whether policies are changed or not.

> and instead sounds like a purely political war cry.

In may in fact be "a political war cry", but is it purely that, or might there actually be something here that deserves attention?

> These aren't lords abusing powerless peasants

This is true, but colorful, rhetorical characterizations like this are an excellent way to persuade people without sticking to cold hard facts.

> they're contributing members of society being disproportionately rewarded for their disproportionate contributions

This rhetorical device is effective in that it persuades readers to logically think of the issue as a binary rather than a continuum.

The proper question is: is their disproportionate reward proportional to their disproportionate contribution? And even this improved statement of the situation is flawed in that is kind of implicitly assumes that the relationship between contribution and reward should be linear, which is inconsistent with the general societal decision that taxes should be progressive (the tax rate(!) increases as the taxable amount increases).

And to be clear, I'm making no absolute claim that progressive taxes are "right", I am only stating that this is what society generally deems "proper". This aspect of the situation seems absent from your analysis, so it seems appropriate to point it out.

> despite the fearmongering you see online

This style of rhetoric is persuasive, and it may even have some truth to it, but it is orthogonal to a proper logical analysis of the actual issue and should therefore be avoided.

> ...most Americans are doing well. Even our poor have modern conveniences, access to emergency healthcare, generally safe food and infrastructure

This style of rhetoric is persuasive in that it frames the issue according to one specific perspective (a subset of dimensions) on the overall (the entire subset of dimensions) issue.

A loose (and uncharitable) restatement of this might go something like: "Because most people are "doing well", then therefore there is nothing to see here." I will note that this isn't actually what you are saying, I'm just pointing out the beauty of rhetoric - when done well, it invokes a style of thinking, which results in real-time generation of certain "facts", without actually having to explicitly say certain things (ex: dog whistling). It can cause the reader to change the way they conceptualize the situation, and therefore change their conclusion from that which it would be if they were to engage in a purely factual analysis of the situation in its entirety.

This isn't to say that you are doing any of the above consciously and with intent to deceive, I'm simply pointing out some of the flaws that are ever-present in the way modern society, politicians, advocates, etc engage in communication. It's no wonder we've made such a mess of things.

People believe they think logically, based on facts, because this is how it seems to each of us. Bu in such matters what people actually do is think in narratives, that are very loosely (and often incorrectly) based on "facts" (most of which are also narratives), and then only a subset of the entirety. This is by necessity, because outside of the hard sciences, systems are far too complex and interconnected to think about using pure logic and facts. However, it's not a necessity to think we think in facts - this we are capable of realizing, and many philosophers and psychologists have amply demonstrated this, but the realization of the importance of this has not made it's way into widespread knowledge, and certainly not into behavior in discourse, even that between highly intelligent people.

I wonder if awareness of such complexities in communication was widespread throughout society, if we could improve the outcomes of our political process. I suspect we'll never know.