"Taxpayers are spending nearly $7 billion a year" is a curious locution when $1.9 billion of that is a tax credit for the workers. Why not say we are "spending" even more by not taking their cars or harvesting their organs? But it's a nice parallel to the $7B in fast food profits.

It's not that difficult of a problem to solve.

It's not that difficult of a problem to calculate, anyway.

According to Politico, people and households making over a million per year took in a total of $726.9 billion.

So let's set the marginal tax rate to 100% -- that's as high as astronomy allows. Those 235,413 high rollers can keep their first million, then we will confiscate the rest.

So $726,900,000,000 minus $235,413,000,000 yields $491,487,000,000 in new tax revenue.

If you split that evenly among 146,243,886 taxpayers, each will get $3,360. A nice bonus, but ten bucks a day is probably not going to dramatically change many lifestyles. You might argue for focusing the largesse on the needier households, but that would be analogous to the benefit programs that this article's author already seems so upset about.

The trouble is, you'll have a hard time convincing those high wage earners to continue, you know, earning once word gets out that they won't get to keep the proceeds. (Another source claims that 90% of people at this level are "self-made with little to no inheritance.") So you have, in one stroke, destroyed a sizable chunk of the economic activity of the nation. The high rollers will shake it off, but their millions of employees and customers -- many of them receiving the benefits described in the original article -- won't be so happy about the change.

You propose simply redirecting that money toward lots of really good things. The problem is that it must be earned before it can be spent. Value is created; it is not a big fixed bucket of dollars that just floats around. That's why there is so much more wealth, in total, now than there was in the past. That's why the poor today are vastly better off than the poor of the past (though they still have crushing needs, especially those outside the developed world).

One more thing: those people hoarding cash are generally not stuffing it under the mattress. That cash is spent or invested -- injected back into the economy to continue working and generating more value. So eliminating the incentive to earn big bucks not only harms those who benefit from the earning activity (the wealthy and the many more regular folks associated with their economic activity), but also those who benefit from it down the line.

Hey, how about that video?