And for those who will say, "Then the government should just build more houses", let me point out that we might run out of space before the appetite for real estate investment dies out.
The people who are ACTUALLY poor, don't have such things.
It's very common for people living in traditional working-class neighbourhoods to own a house and suddenly become paper rich when gentrification happens (e.g. Venice Beach in LA). They might find themselves in a situation where, in theory, they have a lot of wealth from the house but don't participate in the economy at the same level.
There are homeless people.
People who are barely able to rent a room in a crack house.
You are NOT POOR if you own a single family house in Englewood. End of discussion. Sorry.
Sell your house and live off the annuity for life at > median income after taxes in perpetuity. If you don't, there is literally no excuse for your situation other than your own choosing.
What's different here - that is critical - the actual poor HAVE NO CHOICES.
IMO the main thing they extract from the working poor is time - what they're stealing is the excess value between their labor and the value is creates, and technology has made it easy to do this at a massive scale. So it's less $1 from each person, it's 8 hours per day from a million people makes 1 person a billionaire.
For one, there aren't 100m poor people in the US. Not even close.
Second, billionaires have almost $7T in wealth - the top .1% are at about ~$20T.
They didn't get any meaningful percentage of that by taking pennies off of 45M. You'd need to take thousands. And they just don't have it. That's almost $450k per "poor" person.
That's more than the median HH wealth in the US.
If you look at the "actual poor" - you're likely looking >$1M per person.
You simply cannot "steal" that from the "poor" (who have almost nothing to steal, by definition).
Even if you amortize that over decades - it is just not how it happened.
By definition, the poor have almost no money to transfer.
Wouldn't you have to transfer from the middle class - which is shrinking in relative terms?
The poor have never had anything and still largely have nothing. It is literally in the definition.
I don't see how it's possible to enrich yourself (when the amount you need to grow by even small percentages is enormous) from a class with nothing to take.