The short answer is it won't help much and it might hurt a lot. 90% of working Americans make less than 100k / yr. The tax structure is already skewed so that

The short answer is it won't help much and it might hurt a lot. 90% of working Americans make less than 100k / yr. The tax structure is already skewed so that the richer you are, the more you pay, and you can make it more extreme... but it does nothing to help the 90% of people who make less than 100k / yr. When thinking about distribution, it's not about reduction, it's about transfer. So you need to think in terms of transfers, not in terms of earnings amounts. But, putting a max income ceiling is an interesting systemic exercise. What do you want to happen and what will actually happen? It seems sensible, maybe we can put a cap of say $5m a year on income. But the problem is that we have no clue how people who make more than $5m a year feel about it and how they will respond. One way to get insight it is to put it in income levels that you can understand. Lets say you put the max at 30k / year. This would vastly disincentive people who are working really tough jobs that pay well because there is an equivalent easier job that pays just as well, so it would devastate certain industries. If collecting garbage paid the same as petting kittens, the garbage collection industry would face a huge worker shortage and they would not have the levers (raising salary) to attract people. At what point does the max salary cap stop hamstringing certain industries? I'm not sure. But the NBA / NFL max salary is like $50m a year I think? So at least at that level. Bleeding down asset holdings over time to a certain level is also interesting but also not likely to help - the economy holds the stability of our assets as the basis for trust. If assets slowly shrink over time to a fixed number OR just disappear overnight (via taxes or other things) there would be a massive scramble to find the asset that is the safest to hold - basically, people will scramble to find that one investment / place in the economy where your assets are secure. Most optimistically, it would create a giant "hunt for the tax loophole" system, but it's likely to destabilize the entire economy. The hard part of the solution to inequality is that we have to think about how to get poor people more money BUT no one wants to just give them money because they have to "earn it". This is where many people get stuck in the old way of thinking. 90% of American people can't do much of anything to earn more money for themselves. There's this naive thought that rich people are siphoning it away from poor people, if we just hamstring the rich then the poor people will get more of it. The sad truth is that poor people are not worth much in today's market economy, not valued by the market, so no matter what you do to rich people, it won't help. It's not that poor people are worthless to society though. People are people, poor or rich, and together we create a dynamic, diverse, robust and enriching society in many ways other than wealth. But the economy doesn't care about that - it just cares about one number going up. You need to have a clear sense of the available options you have (levers) and what they do in order to understand how to affect change in a good way. Especially when fixing inequality, you'll have to think about levers outside of the economic system because all the economic levers affect things within the constraints of market forces, but its the market forces themselves that you need to offset.