My issues with inequality and wealth- folks like Brad are the folks who should be encouraged- I just feel the way American society is becming, we'll have fewer Brads.
Sometimes help and "handouts" can be good investments. The university Brad went to- going there was a government handout in a sense, public education is subsidized.
The question though is what is going to cause fewer "Brads"?
You imply that it is a lack of public spending on universities. Public spending on universities has increased every year since Brad went to college. It is, in fact, the number one reason why college has become so unaffordable. In the ~15 years since I started college until now the university I went to has gone from ~$30,000/year (paid for 50/50 by academic scholarship and loans) to ~62,000/year. Imagine being an 18 year old kid asked to take on $124,000 in loans (assuming the same 50/50 split I had) for an undergraduate degree. My sister-in-law is a practicing lawyer and swears if she had it to do over again she wouldn't. She'll be paying off her loans into her 40s. Imagine a 22 year old recent college grad with a good idea for a company who has to choose between paying his loans (at >$1,000/month) or starting his company. He can't possibly start his company AND pay his loans, not unless he's lucky to have rich parents. You average smart kid from a poor or middle class family is screwed. He needs a job to pay his loans and has to put his idea away. The problem in this scenario isn't "rich" people, it's the cost of education.
I'd argue quite the opposite of your point. Not only is public spending on education alive and well, it's actually pat of the problem. The cost of education for the individual has increased at virtually the exact same rate that government spending on education has. More broadly I'd argue the same problem exists with public spending on environmental regulation, health care regulation, etc. The problem with an ever-increasing size of government is that it stifles the "little guy" from setting out on his own because only big corporations can afford to navigate the regulatory maze and then, once navigated, only they can afford to absorb the costs placed on business by those regulations (See FMLA, ADA, ACA, and hundreds of others). That's not saying regulation is inherently bad (it isn't), but that our insistence on ever growing regulation (spending) is. The government is the only force in society that has the power to distort the system at will. Unfortunately the US government doesn't treat that power with the respect it deserves and we end up with a screwed up system that does nothing but generate wealth inequality because only the powerful can afford to navigate the system. The system which places real and significant barriers to entry between small start up companies and the big players who can afford to work it. By the way, this isn't a partisan thing. George Bush is guilty of it too, just like Barack Obama (only in different policy areas).
To bring it full circle, this is the problem with a sense of systemic entitlement by the masses towards the successful. We are at (or near) a point where more spending, more regulation is always the answer because that's what a majority of the people want. Group 1 gets it's spending, group 2 gets theirs, etc until we have a system designed to keep separate little groups happy at the expense of the greedy, evil "rich". What we end up with is a system that has destroyed the ability of the poor and lower middle class to move up because they can't afford whatever opportunities they find. The fault isn't "rich people", but government not willing to break the sense of entitlement by determining what is truly social safety net (and therefore indispensable) and what is a freebie.