This “redistribution of wealth” is called a progressive tax and is what nearly every free market country in the world uses. The more you make the more you contribute on both an absolute and percentage basis. It’s pretty simple stuff and you only pay more on the marginal rate so if you make $300k you are paying 3% more on that last $50k or $1500 per year. Wow, that’s such a drastic redistribution of wealth! And since you’re also probably fully funding your 401k and maybe some pretax insurance it’s not even that much.
Here’s how Adam Smith (who is known as the founder of free market economcis) described a progessive tax in Wealth of Nations:
The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
The phrase “redistribution of wealth” is yet another GOP talking point that gets the loon base all fired up, but it’s what we have all lived with in our lifetimes.
