I fully realize I'm saying this because I'm not in that bracket, but if you make more than $10m/yr, do you really need the extra money that much?
It's not like rich people just sit around on piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. They put that money to work so that they can earn some interest. The government will happily just spend it, though. So should it be doled out by congresspeople to their friends, or should it be invested by someone shrewd enough to be making $10m/yr in the first place?
They put the money in things that will generate the highest return. The government will (hopefully) put the money in things that will benefit people, even if they don't have an especially high ROI in the short term.
I am not at all confident in the ability of capitalism to save the environment, for example.
"Look at this problem a government caused that those nasty rich people haven't fixed!" is not a fantastic argument for making them give more money to the government.
Not all congresspeople are corrupt and not all those making $10m/yr are shrewd. These are classic government-bad capitalism-good strawmen.
Personally, I doubt most of the folks capable of spending/investing $10m/yr are actually making that money themselves.
In that case I would prefer the semblance of accountability I get from Uncle Sam instead of the supposed benevolence of random individuals spending money that fell in their laps.
Then everyone will be making >$10m/yr as the value of the dollar drops to zero.
Look at it from the company perspective. There is a skill that is worth a lot of money to them which they want to acquire. If they are willing to pay $1mm more than their competitor for that skil, for that amount of money to actually go to recipient, it will now cost the company $7mm of profit.
That skill is no less valuable or essential to the company, it’s just effectively impossible to pay for it now. The extra money paid in taxes in order to acquire that skill comes off the balance sheet — and effectively is being taken away from the same pool of money that is being spent to hire workers at $50k/year.
The $50k/year worker can not do the job of the $10mm/year worker. 100 of them cannot do the job either (because so much key labor is not actually divisible).
It’s hurting the company balance sheet to effectively pay their most important employees, which hurts the company.
Likewise, the employee making $10mm+ per year is a visionary who, like an Elon Musk, is contributing to the economy in ways a lot more profound than a few extra cents in everyone’s welfare checks.
“No one needs more than a million dollars a year, just take everything above that to even things out” means you never have people willing to lay it all on the line to try to do something more as well.
And so it’s basically a ceiling on what that company can pay an employee versus what the employee could go make on their own or elsewhere.
At $50k-$100k you can assume there are limits to what an employee can do. At $10m plus anything is on the table.
So instead of taking a raise, I take a day off per week. Or two.