The only issue with wealth/income inequality in countries like America is that some goods are artificially constrained or positional (mostly housing).
A mediocre salary of $40,000 is enough to buy so many goods from competitive markets (phones, cars, anything you can get off Amazon/AliExpress). This becomes very apparent when you go to lesser developed countries.
The major costs in people's lives do not come from the billionaire class. If you tax them into oblivion and give that money away, it will be soaked up by housing anyway (look how sharply housing costs have risen after the growth in real income the past 2 years).
It seems to me that your argument against taxing billionaires reduces to “we shouldn’t tax them because if the commoners have more money then residential housing will be more expensive.” I would argue that is more indicative of issues in the housing market rather than a good reason to continue to allow the extreme aggregation of wealth.
The sharp rise in housing costs in the past two years in some areas is down to complex confluence of factors, real income being one, artificial scarcity being another, the entrance at scale of corporate interests into residential housing being a third. Add historically low interest rates and fears of flooding, lack of water, and fire, and I’m not sure the increase in prices is such a simple relationship as indicated.
I’m also not suggesting we take the money and rain it down as stimulus checks. That was a desperate response —- we can do better.
A mediocre salary of $40,000 is enough to buy so many goods from competitive markets (phones, cars, anything you can get off Amazon/AliExpress). This becomes very apparent when you go to lesser developed countries.
The major costs in people's lives do not come from the billionaire class. If you tax them into oblivion and give that money away, it will be soaked up by housing anyway (look how sharply housing costs have risen after the growth in real income the past 2 years).