Comment by ferbivore

A government could tax wealth.

You talk about minor wage increases or payroll protection as if this actually benefits the people receiving these benefits. It does on paper, sure, but governments haven't been paying for this through taxes. They've been paying for it by printing money, which devalues money (mostly held by normal people in the bottom X% of society) in favour of assets like houses and stock (mostly held by the top (100-X)% of society). This is a de facto transfer of wealth from normal people to rich and ultra-rich asset owners. Not to mention most of this money goes towards replacing money lost to asset owners anyway - if you make $X, you get fired and the government prints $X to cover that, your relative position is the same, but someone up the food chain from you has just made $X.

This kind of thing drives up asset prices. For the US specifically, house prices have gone up by over 50% since January 2020 (per every index I can find), the S&P 500 has gone up by around 125% (!), the price of gold by around 80%, etc.

Meanwhile, the SSA's National Average Wage Index has gone up 19% since 2020.

If you have a huge portfolio of stocks and REITs and gold, that's great news. If you're a normal person who maybe aspires to one day stop paying rent, this is terrible news. Of course people are upset!