All I know is people are leaving California and going to Texas and Florida.  Population dictates Electoral votes and number of house representatives...  tax high income earners even more isn't going to play out well in the long run.  

And the point of letting people be wealthy is to drive motivation that leads to innovation.  The US has 8 out of the top 10 companies in the world.  Nvidia is worth something like France + Germany  + UK stock market combined.... 

Just my 2 cents.  Take it or leave it.  To each their own and all that.  

This has more to do with urban planning policies than tax rates. Many southern states have very progressive income tax rates they inherited from the New Deal era. 

Like I said, I live in a purple state with a flat income tax at the state and local levels. Taxes are lower here. But because it is a rust-belt state it has historically had a population decline. It borders high tax states (New York and New Jersey.) If it were just about income and property taxes people would be fleeing here and not to Georgia and South Carolina, where income taxes are much higher.

The topic wasn't about whether people should be disproportionately wealthy (that is a different discussion), but rather whether or not it is stealing from the rich to have progressive income taxation. Given that the system we have is designed for the rich it is certainly not. Progressive income taxation was a solution to "save capitalism from itself" when the working class was calling for much more radical solutions.

No.

Reality is complicated. You want to complain that 22k isn't representative of the bottom 90%, because it's not. It wasn't intended to be, if I wanted to make something perfectly representative of reality, I would need to set up a much more complicated situation. 

Because it is impossible to generalize perfectly.

Like this generalization, it depends on where you live. 

200k in some parts of California, is probably struggling to own a tiny house. 

200k per year in some parts of the Midwest, you could easily own a couple of good houses that practically look like mansions compared to those California houses. 

it's hard to generalize when there are millions of different situations. Whether you have 5 kids or 2 or 0, whether you have nice cars or $2k cars that drive but are pretty beaten up. Even what town you live in - which affects the cost of housing. All of those things massively make differences. 

200k is in the top 10%, and 22k is in the bottom 90%. 

And yet you took issue with one, but not the other. 200k is not representative of the entire top 10%, just like 22k is not representative of the bottom 90%.  

Yet liberals aren't losing those elections. They're not losing California, New York or Illinois.  

And yet a lot of these people are moving to areas where taxes are high in different ways. A lot of those people are moving to Texas where property taxes are so much higher that most of them are paying more in taxes than the Californians are.  

The bigger issue that California is having is that they're not building enough houses. 

I was originally going to set up a completely different scenario of a billion people making a dollar and 1 person making a billion dollars. Would it be fair for each half to be paying the same amount of taxes? 

This is the point of the thought experiment - I added this comment before you wrote your post, but apparently you quoted before I edited so you missed it:

If tomorrow your wages doubled, your costs wouldn't double. You need a smaller percentage of your income to live as you make more. Housing and food don't suddenly cost more just because you make more money. Your first thousand dollars is much more important than your millionth thousand dollars. 

Billionaires are not living the same quality of life as everyone else just 1000s of times more expensive than everyone else for some reason.  

I think the answer to that thought experiment is it is pretty obviously not fair. But I am sure you are going to deflect, because you feel it doesn't properly convey reality, or maybe you feel the people who have a dollar in this scenario obviously did something wrong. 

It's not even true that most red states have lower taxes. Look at WV, NE, SC, MO, LA, MS, OH, AL, KS, KY, OK, IA, and ID. Compare them to blue states like WA, CO, IL, NH, MA, RI, MD, NM, DE, VA and purple states like PA, NV, MI, and AZ. They're roughly the same if not higher. 

Not every blue state is CA, OR, NY, and NJ. 

The other ironic thing is most of these big tech and finance companies have heavy presences in the high-tax blue states. What tech companies exist in the retirement home that is Florida? 

Most people are left they just don't realize it. There really isn't as much between people as politics would have you think. Being able to afford rising cost is left. Clean water and air is left. Getting medical care when you need it is left. Not starting is left. Freedom of speech and religion is left. Stopping corporations from stealing everything is left. Caring about people beyond your immediate circle is left. Science and objective reality is left. Education is far left. Not committing genocide is classically left. Everyone is left. The issue is that politics play with the words and definitions and the so called left and right in government don reflect actual people because we are a mix of both and acting like we have to completely seperate in order to get along is crazy.

Yup, this. If post-modern people experienced life even as late as the Great Depression they'd go hard left. 

The problem with the parliamentarian left was that it couldn't move beyond the center-left successes in electoral reform (to include working class people), social reform (to include workers rights and social benefits), etc to an even more forward-thinking vision. They just got stuck defending those gains they achieved in the post-war era rather than give a new vision of where society was headed.

Meanwhile the right created this fantasy of "what life was like before..." that was never a reality. We see this with, for example, the trad-wife delusion that women weren't civic and economic actors before modern times. Meanwhile, women were pretty much critical in helping manage the economic units that were familial subsistence farms and were heavily integrated in trades and guilds as well. The only areas where they didn't have a significant presence were physically demanding ones like blacksmithing. 

The left needs to have a vision and story that is just as compelling as the right's palingenetic views. In the past this was marxism, but we have to move beyond marxism or reformulate it to fit the post-modern social reality if we want to have a compelling story. 

You've completely missed my point and ran off down some land ownership rabbit hole.

My entire point is people shouldn't approach life with a predetermined thought process.  Most things in life can't be optimally solved with a left/right/center mindset, which is why people should abandon this idea of self labelling themselves

Because you've missed the point, I'm going to write it again; and please this time remove your preconceptions. 

I'm curious now, what are some of your political positions?

Like, what constitutes an extremely right wing view for you?

Lets see. All I want is a balanced society that does good by those that want to be be part of the society. Generally I would hope most people would be in the middle somewhere. Being extreme left or right doesn't keep a society moving forward as all it does is cause politicians to fight and stall everything, especially in a minority government.

Immigration:

I like immigrants who come here that want to learn, make a better life for themselves and want to contribute to society. They also will do the jobs locals will no longer do or have the desire to do.

I hate immigrants who come here and leech off the system and do not learn English and eventually jobs, cause crime, think marrying underaged girls is ok culturally, burn our flag at rallies.

Social aspects:

I like that we provide universal healthcare.

I like we now have superfunds and companies have to pay towards your retirement fund essentially.

I like that we provide money to unemployed and disabled (although it's small), discounts for unemployed and seniors, and other public services.

I like that NDS exists to support disabled people, however I hate how abused the system is by some of the operators (i.e. skimming cash for their own gains and not making it to the people that need it most).

I hate that the middle class is the one paying for all the social aspects.

I hate they want to redistribute wealth from the middle class essentially, but are happy to give multi national companies sweet royalty deals for all our resources to be exported for not much profit compared to other countries.

I hate that there is a small percentage of people abusing the unemployment benefits and never look for work.

I hate how if I say "Merry Christmas" some people get offended and tell me I have to say "seasons greetings" to be inclusive, but Diwali, Ramadan etc get shoved in our faces. All beliefs should have a place in a multicultural society even the local ones lol.

I hate how pensioners who were tax payers get beardly any money like those who never worked or intent to work. 

I hate that in some states you can "identify" as an aboriginal without a DNA test. It's a slap in the face to the genuine aboriginal people.

Politicians
I hate politicians who are dead set against progress and want to wealth distribute to the extreme level (i.e. Greens can't build anything, want charge everyone huge tax rates)

I hate politicians on the other end who are happy to destroy everything for the sake of what they call progress.

Hopefully it's not so extreme where they demand people should be sentenced to death just for being a different ethnicity.

In saying that, it's perfectly fine to hold extremist views, it's only when you try to apply those views onto others, that it becomes an issue. (And that is regardless if you are left or right.)