> Make poor people richer with basic support like free education and health care. Tax the richer. That should solve the problem.

Economics matter first and foremost and always gets ignored in these discussions as if you can hand wave away poverty by taxing everything to death (and I say that while supporting public health insurance).

France does everything you said and much more... but their cost of living is much higher relative to their income https://livingcost.org/cost/france/united-states.

On paper in exchange from increasing taxes for the wealthiest from 50% -> 75%+ in France the incomes of the bottom 50% increased around 10% [1] (remember this is relative, so imagine $30k->$33k): https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg... https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/pre-distribution-versus-redis... [biased source] meanwhile US GDP grew 50% faster than France since the 90s. Per-capita GDP for lower 90% didn't increase in France vs US either.

If your income/wealth isn't growing meaningfully over time and you must rely on gov bandaid programs to afford anything, and basic cost of living is such where you can't go buy food/rent/clothes/entertainment/gas etc for cheap, then you're not much better off. You're just stuck in a country that's in permanent mediocre stasis while others grow. Same deal here in Canada. And recently the US is moving this way too.

There's better ways to fight wealth aggregation in the top 10% and have a fairer economy than mass redistribution IMO.