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.