Mike, u can lay off calling me a cry baby and unamerican, (I am not crying. I am telling it like it is. And I have always been a patriotic American.)
Your conception of “greed” is a foremost example of your ass backwards mindset. U used Jesus “Render unto Caesar…” quote to mean “don’t be greedy”. I am not religious, but u are taking that quote, SO out of context in a back asswards way. Jesus was responding to opponents who were trying to trick him into saying that people should not pay tribute (taxes) to Caesar (the govt). So Jesus undermined their attempt to “gotcha” him, when Jesus basically said “Pay taxes and give God what is due to God.” Somehow u have turned that around to say that Jesus was saying “don’t advocate that the VERY rich pay more taxes because you would be stealing from them.” Jesus was not saying anything at all about that. (BTW, Jesus’s teachings in general, would have been much more in line with a social and economic justice agenda, than with a hand’s off capitalist agenda. Speak with Pope Francis if u don’t believe me.)
The VERY rich are not going to go broke from paying a high share of taxes. Because all the proposals for such, start after a relatively high base amount. e.g., Warren’s proposal of 70% tax is on income AFTER the 1st $50 MILLION. So the VERY wealthy are not going to go broke, they will remain very wealthy. (In the 50’s, a heyday for a strong emerging middle class, the tax rate for the wealthy was 90%.) SO your concerns that the rich will have their wealth “stolen” down to nothing is BS.
Your calling progressive taxation “stealing” is BS. Those who are fortunate enough by virtue of inheritance, or intense focus and effort to gain wealth, or by having particular skills or talents, or even by trickery, manipulation, and shameless exploitation of others can have their wealth, which in our society they have more of everything, (including more of a voice in policies, since money is speech and corporations are people). They also have MORE “justice” in our criminal “justice” system.
Okay, they are going to have more of everything than the less financially fortunate, or more than those who are simply about living and providing something to their world, than they are about accumulating exorbitant wealth. But after a point, the amount of wealth of the exorbitantly wealthy, becomes redundant. And the DISPARITY of wealth becomes untenable. If u want to know who is metaphorically “stealing”, you should look to see where the money is. Did they top .1% of wealthy people, earn all of that excessive wealth, by being smart or talented or by the sweat of their brow? (some of it, maybe, but not all of it) Do Americans who work multiple jobs, and are still on the verge of being completely broke, deserve to be at the mercy of one health dilemma that will destroy them? Do young people deserve to have no chance to buy a home because they have college debt that is more that the cost of a home? Do they deserve this in a country where the wealthiest have more wealth than most people can even imagine? I and others say that to whom much is given, much is expected. It is not stealing to expect that those who have more wealth than is reasonable, contribute to the rest of their society, to the extent that the disparity of wealth is not so amazingly out of whack.
Your concern for the extravagantly wealthy and accusations of the least fortunate of stealing from the rich, is one of your most back assward ideas. Are not corporations that make extraordinary profits “stealing” from their workers by making those profits, to a great extent off of their employees efforts, then not sharing the profits with them, at all, but giving crazy bonuses to the CEO types? In the U.S., corporate profits have gone up and up and up. Production has gone up and up and up. Workers pay has stayed the same. Is that not a kind of theft?