That's why I only stated the top 19 for the mass of STEEM they are mining ;) Yes, all rewards are created, based on previous rewards created, and this is an inflation compared to producing no new rewards which would be 0% inflation. Witness, comments, posts, and curation are all getting new tokens that are part of that inflation. Inflation is not a tax, it's a result of creating more of what was: STEEM tokens, in this case. The alternative is no new tokens are created. Then what would happen to this platform?
As I said, voting on posts of development would be allocating author rewards, and the top 19 witnesses can send some of their rewards too based on what they value. They make a ton each week. At around 9,000 per month, with their servers costs not being close to that, and the future of RocksDB reducing server hardware requirements, they will have even more STEEM left over. Voluntarily funding work being done on Steem is something they can do, if they want to, if they want development funding to happen, rather than expect Steemit to pay people...