I'm asking again: What happens if we take the wealth not just from the top 1%, but the top 10%, then spread it among the rest? How much does everyone get? Would it be a life-changing amount of money?
Crunching the numbers, we can determine that the top 10% had $67.15 trillion. If this full amount is distributed equally to every person in the bottom 90%, as the question states (let's call this the "kill the bourgeoisie" scenario), each person in the bottom 90% would receive $235,000 on average.
If we wanted to forcefully distribute the money while leaving the people at the top intact (let's call this "blunt force redistribution") such that the current top 10% has 10% of the wealth, then each person in the bottom 90% would receive $208,000 on average.
I would definitely consider this a life-changing amount of money.
[1] http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/images/wealth/Net... via http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HNONWRA027N
[3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Edit: Especially when you consider that this article[4] came out in 2013, a majority of people will be able to 1) basically completely exit debt and 2) start contributing substantially to the economy again. Not to mention afford college, afford healthcare, afford good food for themselves and their children, drop a whole lot of stress, and generally build their lives back up. There would be zero people below the poverty line. Who knows if the traditional refrain of "velocity of money increasing means inflation means collapse" would be realized in such a radical redistribution, and if a sudden and drastic shift such as that would end up hurting more than helping. We can only ever play the speculation game in matters like these.
The numbers in the main body reflect also the worth of nonprofits. Not sure on the proportions on that one, but even if you take it to be 10% of all the wealth (IMO an absurdly high estimate) the number still shifts to $187,000 per person in the bottom 90%.
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/index.h...
They would receive assets valued at 208,000$ at current (arguably inflated) prices, most of it not being cash. You might expect the biggest expropriation in US history to be somewhat upsetting to the markets.
Now that we've established an upper bound, maybe we can talk about what percentage of that money can realistically be taken and what problems it could actually solve.
Technically true, but the path of this redistribution would be in the form of taxation and offered public services, which is extracted purely as cash.
According to the Obamacare website, poverty levels are around $11,000 per person, scaling sublinearly with the number of people in a single household. If we use that as a baseline, we'd need to tax the top 10% about 5% more per year and redistribute that in cash or an equivalent value of provided services (education, healthcare, etc.) to create a buffer that effectively nullifies the concept of a poverty level. In reality this would likely be applied more as a progressive tax, so the top earners would be taxed more and more benefits would go to the people who are actually poor.