How about we do the exact opposite?

Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.

Work with incentives instead of against incentives.

That's the current status quo, isn't it?

There's yachts and fancy houses and supercars to buy for the rich. They make their lives better, in some way. A lot of people are employed to make those things.

I don't see how this helps anyone. If wealth were distributed more equally, those people would work on making the lives of everyone better, not just the lives of a small elite.

Ah that sounds smart, so in a way the wealth will trickle down to the common man? Someone should try it.

You can't talk about top rates without also talking about where they kick in. Italy's top rate of 43% kicks in for everything over 50k euros. The 50k feels a bit low to me, and maybe 100k euros would be better. 90% of everything over 5M may work, but then you run into another problem where people that rich are not bringing home a salary. So you lower where it kicks in and then just impact the working professionals, which also isn't who you really want to target. And if you do want to target those working $500k+/year, removing the cap (176,100 this year) on SS payments is probably a better path.

So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.