It's not difficult to imagine an economic system that works...

... and many "first world" nations have achieved something close to that.

The U.S.A. is not a "first world nation."

To build an economy that works you first need a generous social safety net. You pay for this safety net by taxing the wealthy.

We might divide the population into five groups:

The "low income people" would be full time college and trade students of all ages, the chronically unemployable, people who can only work part time, people who have retired from lower middle class jobs, etc.. ALL OF THEM, like every other citizen, would be entitled to to excellent food, public health care, free education, and safe, secure places to live, places that they can call their own, places where they can paint the walls whatever color they want, places where they can settle down for years if they want to.

The lower middle class would begin at full time minimum wage employment. This would be a much greater minimum wage than now exists in the U.S.A.. Education and health care would still be free, as with all the other groups. Housing options might be public or private. This lower middle class would pay no income tax.

The middle class would pay income taxes sufficient to support their own aggregate use of public services, mostly health care and education with some small surplus. This would be the largest group of workers, and might graciously consider themselves unsubsidized and "self-supporting."

The upper middle class would pay progressively greater taxes, but not so much as the wealthy class, maybe 40-50% on everything exceeding what a full time minimum wage job pays.

The wealthy class would be taxed to such an extent that their share of the national wealth would never exceed 20%, by a combination of income and wealth taxes. The "one percenters" as we now know them would simply be taxed out of existence. The shares of giant mega-corporations would be spread across a much larger base of shareholders, and these corporations might even be nationalized to some extent.

The only truly just economies are "trickle up," where money is created for the benefit of the poor and middle classes, where money is taxed off the top, from the wealthy classes, and recirculated before it has a chance to stagnate and become a source of political and economic corruption.