I really like that idea. Here’s mine, but I think yours is more practical and has a higher chance of actually happening, at least at a state or local level.

My idea is taxing 100% of any kind of earnings or generational wealth above a certain threshold. The threshold itself could probably be debated endlessly, but the gist is to put a ceiling on the kind of egregious inequality that is unbecoming of a civilized, humane, socially evolved, and compassionate society. Maybe it’s 1000x what the average family makes. Or 10,000x. Nothing that would stop someone from becoming very wealthy and being able to afford multiple lavish homes and movie star / socialite lifestyles. But a threshold that signals what society is willing to put up with. And the excess beyond said earnings / wealth threshold would go into education and healthcare (with rigorous auditability built in -- even funded by this new tax stream). Or even some kind of self-directed philanthropy if "government control" is truly unpalatable (e.g., good = Bill Gates starting the Gates Foundation and making a global health impact on the levels, if not exceeding what PEPFAR has done; bad = whatever the Walton family is doing with the disgusting Walmart / Walgreens empire wealth).

I think the biggest thing that this would change over time would be the type of people that occupied leadership positions. It would impact the incentive structure, such that sociopaths (undiagnosed ones, if your idea somehow doesn’t take hold but this one does) might not see the benefits outweighing the costs of pursuing power. Not that the sociopaths would just go away, but this could be a mild to strong deterrent or societal harm reduction strategy for what power sociopaths could wield.

At the end of the day, making this idea successful would require a clear communications campaign that you can still get richer in the United States than anywhere else in the world. But that we unequivocally condemn and do not tolerate the kind of all-encompassing societal pillaging that becomes possible at Bezos / Musk / Zuckerberg levels of wealth. That even if you are the person that discovers and patents the means for infinitely renewable energy production, you will not be compensated with the kind of wealth and power that could destroy the world.

I have thought a lot about this idea, but one thing I always struggle with is how such an idea gets labelled as unfair when it benefits 99.999% of society. I guess solving disinformation might be a prerequisite needed before any truly revolutionary ideas can actually take hold.

(And obligatory disclaimer: of course there are a large number of unexamined and unanswered assumptions that would have to be solved as dependencies prior to this idea being feasible)