In my experience, virtually everything that falls into that category is some sort of status symbol. The grandparent poster is suggesting replacing these implicit status symbols with an explicit one.
The part about his proposal that I'd miss is the ability to save up your high income for a few years so that you could compensate for a low income the next few years, and then do something more interesting during that time. But if you're earning $90K regardless, that wouldn't matter, because you'd be able to do the more interesting stuff anyway.
Actually, that leads to the real problem in his proposal: you lose the information-carrying capacity of money. I'm basically ambivalent about most of my income over a number that's a lot less than $90K; I don't spend it anyway. But if I'm faced with two jobs that look equally interesting, I'll take the one that pays more; the additional money is a proxy for how much that business is valued by the marketplace, and I'd rather work on things that will make lots of people happy. Same with when I start a business: there're lots of projects that are interesting, but profit is a way of telling which ones are interesting and useful to others.
OTOH, a stack ranking does that as well. The problem with the stack ranking is that you can't pass along that surplus down the value chain. So, for example, if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to, because the government would take the money you would otherwise have paid the graphic designer.
I was thinking that people could work part-time and earn 50% of standard income. Median household income is around $50k right now, so this is a decent standard of living.
> if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to
A two-person household where both members worked full time would be making 3.6x the current median household income, which is way more than they need. This surplus could be used as investment capital, where it would be distributed and decentralized, so it would be much easier to do Kickstarter-style funding. If we accept $75k at the point where money stops having an impact on happiness, individuals would have 20% above that line to play with for those kinds of things. Essentially, the stack ranking converts your surplus productivity into status for you, and distributed evenly to your friends and neighbors, who have the power to return it to you if they think your project is socially or economically valuable.
Some good points though, especially the part about profit as an index of what makes people happy. The problem with our current system is that this is only true if your profits come from people who make less than $75k. 40% of consumer spending is driven by people in the top 10% ($82,500 annual income), so it's fair to say that that spending is misallocated and doesn't contribute to overall happiness.
Salary caps are, in my opinion, a backwards view. When someone says "basketball players shouldn't be able to make $10 million a year," what they're really saying is "people shouldn't be willing to spend $50 on game tickets," or "more of the income the team makes should go to the coach," or something like that. The money is flowing in already, based on the market's decisions. Shouldn't the players get a big chunk of it? They're making it all possible, after all.
Similarly, trying to cap the salary of a doctor or a CEO or whatever is really saying "nobody should value your services enough to give you that much money." But... they do. How can you keep people from paying what they're willing to pay? And if they can't pay more, how can they compete for the best doctor or CEO or programmer or whatever? They will find other ways to compensate.