I agree with almost all your points, except two:
The US estate tax specifically got basically bigger exemptions every time it was touched (even adjusting for inflation), and returns have been falling precipitously for basically the last 25 years. If you own less than $13M at death, it does not affect you at all right now.
> The simple fact that if the US just seized all the wealth of 800+ billionaires today - it would only be worth 6.2 trillion dollars
Sure-- but I think this is a bit of a strawman. To me, and a lot of people that argue in favor of wealth/estate taxation, the purpose is not to substitute income taxes (like what Trump wants to achieve with tariffs)-- the goal is to get wealth inequality back under control, not to balance the government budget with those tax returns.
Another perspective on wealth distribution is that the top 1% own a third of the country. In my opinion, if you have enough wealth (and liquid enough wealth) to outright buy an average home at sticker price, then you are part of the problem;
I absolutely don't want to compete with people like that on the housing market, and I don't want them to extract excessive rents from people like me (i.e. not-1%ers) either, but thats exactly what happens right now.
> But there is certainly a spending problem too.
I don't really agree with this. I think (expected) government responsibilities have grown tremendously over the last century (mainly for good reason).
I'm confident in saying the the American-favored approach to healthcare ("everyone takes care of it on their own, and negotiates/pays for it by himself") has completely failed for IMO very clear reasons (demand for healthcare is inelastic and only government can force pricing transparency, prevent collusion and a generally fair provider-market in the first place-- obviously).
I'm also confident that shifting back more pension responsibilities onto citizens themselves is also a bad idea, because it creates extremely bad potential outcomes in case of an economic crash. Government providing a survivable social security baseline is just a very clearly good idea to me.
Those two points (healthcare + social security) account for the vast majority of government budget, I think they are basically a good idea, and cutting costs with foreign aid, research funding, environmental regulation/enforcement etc. has IMO neither the potential to save significantly in the first place, nor is it beneficial to do so by itself (I'd even go so far and call the whole doge initiative a thinly veiled propaganda department for the current administration).