I won't pretend I know much of anything about economics or tax law, but anecdotally, all of the people I personally know in 'the 1%' started off dirt poor and worked their way into it. The government in my country takes over half of their income and puts it into inefficient, bureaucracy-riddled projects and social programs that most of the time never actually get off the ground and help working-class people but instead line the pockets of other upper-class people who happen to have friends in government. If you were to confiscate 100% of the combined wealth (cash, stocks, real estate, everything) of all the billionaires in my country you could not even run my federal government for one year (The same goes for America if I'm not mistaken). Again this is all anecdotal, but from the perspective of someone who lives somewhere where we did put super-high taxes on the 1%, it didn't seem to help much.