That’s not the core idea he/she is expressing. The core idea is that selecting a certain wealth level or percentile to be outraged about is wholly arbitrary. And therefore it doesn’t make sense to cherry pick the 1%, and if the vague logic of what constitutes inappropriate wealth is to be used, it would make more sense to look at the billionaires than the 1%. The billionaires have incredible wealth per capita compared to the 1%, most of whom still have to actively plan for retirement and worry about financial security.

Personally I think the focus on the 1% is a bad tactic since it targets people who are everywhere all around us, whom their friends know to be talented or hard working or to have undertaken the stress of operating a small business or whatever. For that reason it does and will continue to come off as inappropriate/unfair/immature to demonize the 1%, and hell probably even the 0.1%. This is why Occupy Wall Street was so easily dismissed.

1) Personally I think that you have it exactly backwards. If you look at Western Europe and all the social services provided there, they don't do it by going after billionaire's money because there simply aren't enough of them. They do it by having significantly higher taxes on most above average incomes.

In the US, when we focus the discussion on the ultra rich and move it away from the merely well to do, we take the discussion away from what has to happen if we want things like single payer health care or vastly cheaper college education.

2) Also, for the record this is a little questionable:

compared to the 1%, most of whom still have to actively plan for retirement and worry about financial security

To be in the 1% of wealth you've got to have over 10 million dollars. If you've got that much on hand and you're all that worried about retirement you either can't do math or your idea of a comfortable retirement is quite lavish.

We don't just take the discussion away from what it will take to get what we want; we also either:

(a) implicitly constrain our notion of what is possible ("what is possible is what we can offset with a redistributive pay-for"), or

(b) in reckoning with the fact that billionaires can't (for instance) pay for single-payer health care, force ourselves to reject entirely the notion of accounting and economics (see MMT, which is a serious idea in academia but finds an entirely unserious expression in public policy).

Europe doesn't seem to have this problem; they seem simply to decide that everyone needs guaranteed-issue, subsidized, affordable health insurance (or a single payer), and then tax the middle class to pay for it.