How does inflation affect personal wealth?
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If you have accrued dollars that sit in the bank, in your own piggy bank, or similar purely dollar-denominated assets, the government takes some of the value from those, and gives it to banks in order for them to leverage it many times over through fractional reserve banking and give out loans to other people, in turn providing government with credit to do stuff with, like send checks to people in the mail, build bombs to drop on weddings and hospitals, and give you parking tickets or tell you your garage is 6″ too close to the property line.
No, I don’t have any opinions about that.
And to be fair, many people hold wealth in assets which hold some other sort of value. Commonly those are stocks, which will go up in price following inflation but with a certain time lag, and which are taxed at 15% or 20% when you sell them; and real estate, which is taxed continuously as you own it, or else you will be run off of that real estate, and then also taxed when you sell it. It, too, will increase in value with inflation, but also with a time lag like with stocks.
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