If anything should be progressively taxed its individualized capital gains. It is simultaneously very healthy to incentivize everyone to invest a bit in capital, and extraordinarily detrimental to the health of civilization to let capital concentrate without any impediment.
When do you assess the tax? If it's at any predictable interval of time, it opens the market up to massive manipulation schemes where people crash their own stocks to avoid paying taxes and bid up their rivals so they'll be forced to owe a massive tax bill.
You could I guess take an average over time to avoid the manipulation efforts, but then you still run into the issue many dot-com paper millionaires faced, where they were assessed a tax bill based on the paper value of their options but when it came time to pay it, the stock wasn't worth enough money to cover the taxes.
That's why we have the current system, where capital gains are taxed as income (though at a lower rate), but only when you sell them. That's the only time when you can put a fair value on the asset being sold, when it's convertible into the currency you actually plan to pay the taxes with.
IE, buy all the stock you want. It doesn't matter. The dividends you get, and any payout you get from selling those stocks (even for immediate reinvestment) count as income.
And he wouldn't be in my bracket so he doesn't have to deal with struggles either.
People aren't awarded money arbitrarily... Nobody will pay you more than you're worth. If a good hedge fund manager is able to make 1000x as much as a good doctor, he is worth 1000x as much as a good doctor, by definition, no matter how distasteful that might seem.
I believe @utexaspunk is saying that salary should be tied to the amount of social good you do.
You are saying that the market sets salaries based on how much value you create, as measured in dollars.
That would be great but think of the difficulties. Firstly, which politicians would support it? Most politicians spend their time fundraising ( begging the wealthy for money ).
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-hum...
Can you imagine the future of such politicians?
Especially now that corporations can donate as much as they want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Secondly, the ultra-rich will simply move money/assets offshores in hidden accounts. A lot of them already do that to avoid paying taxes. If it were to increase, a lot more money will go underground.
Thirdly, citizenship is something that can be bought and sold in modern society. The ultra-rich will buy citizenship in countries with lower taxes and simply move their companies/assets there. Look at what the pharmaceutical industry has been doing the past 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_inversion
The problem is that the international world order is corrupt and the wealthy write the rules/laws. Even if there was a raise in taxes, they would add a loophole for the wealthy to bypass it.