Canada

It's not fair to apply that defeatist outlook to one perspective and not the other. You can say that about your idea too, of lifting people out of poverty. How do we lift people out of poverty when the people writing legislation and funding elections have no concept of poor and no incentive to give a shit about the poor?

Here's the thing, if we imagine for a moment that change can be brought on, then taking money out of billionaire pockets is inherently necessary to solve the issue of poverty. Poverty is not a problem of static amounts of money, it's a problem of inequality. In the real world it looks like some people have a few dollars to their name while others have billions, but it'll work exactly the same if some people have a few thousand dollars to their name while others have trillions.

Imo, if we don't "level the playing field" at least a little bit, what'll happen is that as we uplift people out of poverty in one way - e.x. giving them a home, feeding them, and educating them - it'll just get more expensive to do everything else like eat out, go to movies, go on vacation, have internet, have a phone, have electricity and water. We as a society will have freed up some additional money by subsidizing education, housing, food but if left unchecked the wealthier among us will seize the opportunity to take that. And they will, because they have an incentive to. But if you take that extra money away - you can alleviate the incentive and make it not so appealing to try and take every last dollar. And yes, current income tax in most places does not account properly for how billionaires actually hold their money, but they could in this hypothetical scenario. I'm not gonna try and draft legislation here but it's certainly possible, though it might cause all the billionaires to just leave.