Forget them. The best way to deal with the wealthy is to make them irrelevant. We do that by getting past the idea that money grows on rich people and we must somehow get enough from them to have nice things, like children who are fed and educated, or a healthcare system that doesn’t devour a quarter of the economy and still leave people bankrupt should they need it.
The US Dollar is not a finite thing that we can run out of collectively. It is a unit of measure that our law says is to be used to pay taxes and denominate contracts with our government. It is only connected to wealth (resources) as a way of measuring such, just as a carpenter measures boards in feet or inches. The carpenter can run out of boards, but can never run out of the units used to measure those resources.
Tax levies tend to drive resources and labor into the private sector economy where they can be purchased by the government to provision itself using the unit of measure the taxes are denominated in (dollars) and that the government can produce without constraint from revenue. Our government never “needs” our money to spend for any purpose. It simply needs us to need its money so we will sell our resources and labor to pay our tax obligations. This, in spite of how it is framed politically, is always accomplished with a threat of violence or harm.
However, if the government wants to keep a peaceful relationship with those who supply it, it must spend more of its currency than it taxes back or the people soon figure out that doing business with the government doesn’t benefit them at all and will revolt. To effectively organize the society around the currency it creates the government must almost always spend considerably more than it collects to leave citizens a way to store value in their commerce and to net retire private debts, neither of which is accomplished with a “balanced” budget, which is just another way to say 100% tax rate.
Jeff Bezos could do some damage to our economy if he decided to flood it with spending, but that isn’t likely, and why would he want to do harm to the dollar that denominates his wealth? It isn’t his problem, or fault, that America has hungry kids and a piss poor healthcare system. The fault for that lies directly on our propensity for electing idiots that are likely challenged to balance their own checkbook, much less manage the economy.
We probably should tax extreme wealth more, but not with the idea that we must do so before spending on the public purpose. If you understand money at the macro level you would know that taxation and borrowing can’t be funding mechanisms for the currency-issuing government anyway. It has to spend its currency into the economy before it is available to collect or borrow. The red ink of the government is our only net source of black ink.
We must consider wealth accumulation at levels that we deem legal to be currency drains, just as is trade deficits and compensate for those with deficit spending by Congress, as well as any currency needed to fund economic and population growth. Extreme wealth may be a problem we will have to address, but it isn’t “the” problem causing misery in our economy. That would be uninformed or corrupt political decisions, which we have the power to fix.
