Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.

Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.

I’m sorry, did the parent edit their comment? I don’t see how you get “taxing success” out of this.