levite

There's nothing wrong with getting rich. Part and parcel of a capitalistic society is that the successful become wealthy.

But nobody gets rich in a vacuum. People get rich in free societies, where they have the support of technological, educational, governmental and social infrastructures that benefit them and their customers and workers. And therefore, they have a duty to support those infrastructures in proportion to their success.

What I propose is hardly overburdening. Somewhere between 18 to 25% of the reporting households of the United States make over $100,000 per year, with the entirety of the remainder of the populace making less. Thus, it stands to reason that if a significant portion of our governmental revenue is to come from income tax (which it does), it is the richest citizens who must pay the most. I am hardly proposing to beggar the wealthy. If you are making a million dollars a year, I don't really see it as a statement of radical socialism to suggest that it take you two years to put a million dollars in the bank, instead of one year. Nor, I am afraid, do I see much likelihood in causing an aching squeeze to the lifestyle of someone making fifty or a hundred million by forcing them to bank "only" five or ten million. There is noplace on this planet that you cannot live in bewildering luxury on five or ten million a year: so how is it so objectionable to still permit the uber-rich to be uber-rich and enjoy their luxury, while at the same time taking the pinch of overburdened taxation and poverty away from the other 75-82% of the population?

Why is it a punishment to demand that people shoulder the burden of society for which they are capable? Why is that not merely social maturity?

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)