"The top 1%" mostly isn't billionaires, it's cardiologists and lawyers and programmers. It's people who labor for money, not people who inherited it. Most of that wealth is their homes and retirement accounts.

This is the problem I have with these proposals: They get sold as applying to dynastic wealth but in actual fact end up applying to many people who sacrificed years of their lives to go to school or start a business.

> So literally, 99% of the population could pay more in taxes, the 1% would be taking a hit, but honestly so long as long-term average returns are more than 1.2% above inflation, you could still have inter-generational wealth that gets bigger over time.

That's the point. There is no reason to use a wealth tax instead of the existing taxes that we already have unless you're going to use a confiscatory rate.

Existing taxes could -- and already do -- generate enough revenue to fund that kind of program, if we would stop wasting the money on less efficient existing expenditures.

But a confiscatory wealth tax would be self-defeating. It would generate less money, because it would give the wealthy a perverse incentive to spend rather than invest, depriving the government of all the future tax revenue on their investment activity -- which long-term exceeds the amount of the principal.

You have to get at the problem from the other end. What you want isn't to make it harder for wealthy people to make money, it's to make it easier for ordinary people to make money. Reduce barriers to entry so anyone can start a business -- and that business can compete with dynastic incumbents, and dethrone them. Increase competitiveness of markets so capital gets lower margins and more of the surplus goes to customers and workers.

Just taking the money doesn't fix it. You have to address the structural economic conditions that led to that result to begin with.