> There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and asset
Wealth and consumption are different things, though. And CPI inflation is mostly driven by consumption, not assets.
As it is, the wealthiest people still do not make up a very large part of total consumption. In fact, this is a core reason why they're accumulating so much wealth.
My point is that by taxing assets then, sure, we can transfer wealth from the rich to either governments or poor people. But this will not necessarily make it possible for "regular people" to consume more. Once people try to buy more in aggregate than what is produced by the economy, inflation will instantly bring prices up to a level where consumption is brought down to the production capacity.
Also, this idea leaves out a core mechanism. A lot of people that gain nominal wealth tend to want to use that wealth to buy more spare time. They work less, retire early, etc. Increased taxes on wealth tends to only make such choices more rational.
And when people work less, less is produced in aggregate and so less can be consumed. This effect can easily be much greater than the reduction in consumption (private jets etc) within the billionaire class. In other words, the wealth transfer may actually lead to the contraintuitive effect that the ability of "normal people" to consume actually goes down.
In countries that take this kind of wealth transfer to the extreme (Venezuela, for instance) this is exactly what happens. At first, it seems nice, but pretty soon aggregate production goes down so much that everyone (except the corrupt leaders) become poor.
Now I'm not arguing for the other extreme, either. Too little demand in an economy with excess production capacity is not much better, and that's why the Ford-era stimulus approaches work in such economies (either through wages, Ford style, or government spending, Keynes style).
But the reality is that most western countries are already close to a perfect balance between the supply and demand sides (for the purpose of maximizing consumption ability). This is why the extra liquidity that has been provided recently has been leading to so much inflation, world wide.
In practice, though, if you want to transfer consumption ability to poor people, you have to transfer it from demographics that actually contribute to a large part of total consumption, which basically means the upper middle class. This is how it's done in Scandinavia (where I happen to live), and it actually does work for minimizing the Gini coefficients.
Venezuela actually has an income-gini-coefficient not very different from the USA, even if they're a lot poorer, while the only countries with total wealth close to the US while still having low inequality are social democracies in Europe.