I have to disagree. If those at the top are too perversely rich, it doesn’t matter wether those at the bottom may still be doing well at the moment. Human nature dictates that the rich will concentrate power and use it to dictate terms to everyone else, to pervert justice, and concentrate ever more money and power. Even if those at the bottom were well off before, they won’t be for much longer. Just watch what’s happening in the US. The ratio betwen rich and poor has not gotten smaller over the decades.

> If those at the top are too perversely rich, it doesn’t matter wether those at the bottom may still be doing well at the moment. Human nature dictates that the rich will concentrate power and use it to dictate terms to everyone else, to pervert justice, and concentrate ever more money and power.

This is accurate except that it's missing the most important part: The mechanism by which this operates is large organizations, i.e. megacorps and governments. The power vested in the CEO of a huge conglomerate is independent of their personal wealth. A corporation owned by Wall St rather than the founder is at least as likely to engage in rapatorial behavior. Any proposal not effective to break up the power concentrated in large organizations is a sham.

And government spending works the same way. Most of the federal tax dollars collected go to the likes of Lockheed and UnitedHealth and affluent retirees, not the poor or middle class working people. It's actively counterproductive to shovel more money in those directions. It's funding the people who capture the government. Attempting an increase in government revenue when that is where the existing money goes is a plan to make the problem worse. Prove that you can cause the existing money to go somewhere else before you ask for more.

People keep proposing to take money from "Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos" because they're an unsympathetic excuse to divert even more public money to Northrop Grumman and the AARP, and then in the actual bill most of the money comes from doctors and engineers making six figures rather than ten. But the thing it actually needs is to have less public money going to cronies and more aggressive antitrust.