Say, how about having the Federal government take a bigger chunk of the rich person's income and handing it back out by providing services to poor people...
Local city and state taxes get used to fund things, sure, but why would a federal government which issues a currency need to collect it to fund itself? The justification behind federal taxes as a means to encourage/discourage certain activities while maintaining the cash supply/value around a certain level makes sense, the idea about tax dollars from citizen A somehow moving through the system to end up used to pay for welfare for citizen B is a handy lie to spread to get people worked up in a nice righteous froth so they'll be willing to support shit which indirectly or even directly harms them.
Save for thinking I was being obviously facetious, there's also the counter-idea about untaxed dollars from Citizen A somehow moving through the system to end up in the pockets of citizen B so that he doesn't
need welfare, which is a handy lie used to get different people to support a different shit that shits on them instead.
Money is sticky. If you have a lot, more globs onto it. If you don't have much, it gets hoovered up by someone/thing with a bigger glob that you likely necessarily have had to come into contact with.
My non-facetious idea was not to fund federal budgets with the money from the citizens, but to encourage privately organised charity, or else abdicate the responsibility to one or other layer of government. Poor people already have no choices where their meagre (but significant, to them) tax contributions go, the rich can
and do choose which territories (if any!) get their miniscule but still hard-pressed squeezings of blood from their own particular stone. There's room for equalising, there, if there's a will for it. (There won't be, of course. I'm just saying there
could be.)
(If everyone who shopped at (say) Walmart within a jurisdiction privately declared their spending there, then those moneys could not be hidden in Walmart's complex financial machine as
not income earned at whichever of city, state or national levels might rightly claim a concern. Ditto, if a food bank or homeless shelter or a medical centre accepted Walmart support (whether as cash or kind, suitably given a value) then that could be shaved off the Tricklability Tax margin, saving the effort of the Government Machine from having to (perhaps) pay Walmart back their own taxed-dollars in order to provide bedding for the shelter or whatever else might be the current need. But note that I'm not au fait with the current layersbof administratium in the US, and I'm still just as sure that there's no simple path from wherever-you-are-now to wherever-it-is-I'm-trying-to-take-you...)