The causality is a hard question to answer honestly but I can answer the ending poverty portion. So ignore it for now and engage in a bit of rough math. Take th

The causality is a hard question to answer honestly but I can answer the ending poverty portion. So ignore it for now and engage in a bit of rough math. Take the 5.2 trillion of every US billionaire combined and divide it by a third of the US population. It comes out to a one-time payment of about $45k. An amount which would certainly be appreciated by the bottom third of the population, certainly but not a panacea. The poverty line is defined via income and not assets. So lets do a conversion, if paying out the interest only at long-term treasury bond rates that would give the bottom third a "trust fund" which gives an extra $2K per year. Of course that is ignoring many of the messy practicalities. The inflation that would ensue from this hypothetical influx of cash to the bottom third, or if one could even extract the nominal market cap via selling assets vs the value crashing after the first third is put on the market. Combine that with the fact that the fortunes are invested in productive assets and the hypothetical mother of all liquidations would do majorly bad things to productivity and the economy.