The situation is more nuanced in my reading in wealth, income and inequality. In particular, people don’t actually care about absolute inequality. They care a

The situation is more nuanced in my reading in wealth, income and inequality. In particular, people don’t actually care about absolute inequality. They care about progress and opportunity. As you stated, the inability to provide for basic needs trumps the fact that you have an iPhone. But the inability to provide for basic needs is not necessarily caused by wealth divergence. Medical care costs today have little to do with wealth, and more to do with the cost disease, regulatory morass/capture and transferring costs from the young to old. Housing costs, another huge personal expenditure, are driven by local NIMBY restrictions and city zoning planners. Education costs are clearly not driven by the wealthy, unless you believe Bryan Caplan’s signaling theory (which I personally do). But in that case, tax transfers don’t help either. And so here is part of the nuance. Some of the wealthy are ‘stealing’ the money via power/regulatory capture etc. Others are not, they are growing real wealth. Yet others are destroying jobs via automation whole making products cheaper. I’m personally less well off because my Dr. can charge 3x his value and my local city vigorously defends single family zoning at the expense of non property owners. But I’m not really worse off that Elon Musk is selling cars at a competitive price or Tim Cook is selling headphones at 550 a pop. And that nuance is important. Equally punishing the growth with ‘theft’ hurts the economy and doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems. All of these excess costs, make it very hard for people to stay afloat let alone build capital/wealth. And those problems persist regardless if we transfer via taxes; housing markets are artificially constrained and tax transfers will just get sucked up to bid the price up. The medical system will find ways to suck up as much money as it possibly can. Giving people more money just to have it siphoned off isn’t a great fix. So I, as a 1%er wouldn’t mind higher taxes. But we have to fix the underlying problems first. Otherwise your just taking my money to hand off to my Dr’s Porsche fund while the less well off get nothing in return.