I agree with most of what you have to say, except that I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what most people on the left stand for... which is understandable, because many people toss around the word "equality" when what they really mean is "equity". While there are a lot of... Shall we say, "blind" liberals that are incredibly short-sighted and behave basically how you say, most of us understand that people ARE different, and it is BECAUSE of that that we need to treat them differently. A good example of this would be a neurotypical vs an autistic person: if you don't adjust your engagement to treat the autist differently than you would a neurotypical (i.e. allow for them to stim, get away to "cool down" for a bit, communicate nonverbally, flap their hands to blow off steam, etc), they will most likely get (justifiably) upset. An even better example would be access to a building for someone with a wheelchair vs. someone who's abled. Equality would mean both would have to either climb stairs, because the majority of people are capable of using them, while equity recognizes the wheelchair person's disability and would provide a ramp or elevation either in place of or in addition to said stairs
You must REALLY hate where all the money for government officials comes from, then, huh?
That would be a really unproductive use of time and labor, considering that we have crumbling infrastructure that NEEDS to be repaired, the construction and reparation of which is already included in most local taxes
In my experience, there's no such thing as unskilled labor, only labor in which the skillset is unappreciated. Just because a job may require little to no mental presence, for instance, doesn't mean it isn't physically demanding, and likewise in converse. I'd like to see your ditch digger try to code a website while your software engineer takes a stab at digging ditches at the same rate as they did, for example. Both will probably suck at it. (Plus, in what reality is a software engineer making only slightly more than $15/hr? If that's you, you need to demand a raise because your time is being undervalued)
Plus, I'm a bit peeved that you're tossing in the whole "if we pay the lowest wage-earners more, then they'll be making just as much as people with slightly higher wages, and that's unacceptable!" mantra, because that is EXACTLY what people with power always say to make sure that no one ever is payed more for their time, and you're just another person who's swallowed that line and is feeding it back out. You act as though placing more value on one person's job somehow takes value away from someone else's, as though value is a scarecly limited resource, but it's not; if the lowest earners are paid enough to actually feed themselves while paying rent, a few things will happen: jobs will open up, allowing for more people to enter the workforce (there are a LOT of people working two and three jobs just to get by, in my eyes that's unacceptable), wages will go up incrementally all the way up as laborers in higher positions demand wage increases and finally get that bargaining leverage, and the local economy will improve as more of the people who were just barely getting by in the lower-middle class can finally afford some non-essential niceties.
Now, I'm also no fool, I've seen how the push for $15/hr has negatively affected Seattle (although there are a lot of things that make the numbers a little questionable, such as including chain industries that have locations outside of Seattle in the study, as well as the fact that to fight paying increased benefits employers slashed hours and hired more part-time workers), but I've also seen how positively efforts are going in New York with the slow roll-out of an increase from $9 to both $12.50 and $15, depending on the area. All in all, I recognize that it absolutely has to depend on what the local cost-of-living is, and I will agree that fiscal conservatives have a lot of valid points on the matter that should be considered an allowed to collaborate with in terms of how to budget. But everyone needs to be on the same page in understanding that if someone puts in 40 hours a week, they shouldn't be struggling to get by, no matter what job they're doing