The "problem" is not the doctor who struggled through med school to make 250K a year. The issue is the billionaire making tens of billions a year (and in some cases paying LESS in taxes).
Let's not kid ourselves. Everyone making that much money forms a social class that works to reengineer society to protect themselves, doctors included. However, we have engineered the system to make it look as though they deserve that much money by working students to exhaustion and saddling them with debt and poor working conditions. If we changed that, it wouldn't seem necessary to let specialists earn 250-700k+ per year. It's hard to believe that any of this is necessary or wise in a medical system.
Professional guilds like lawyers and doctors also limit the number of people in the field to protect wages. The AMA has been essentially an enemy of the people that works to milk the CPT codes. The grift is that a procedure typically is X$ and takes Y hrs to perform. They recommend that some are easier and harder and create a cheap CPT code and an expensive CPT code. This seems fair. Then everyone marks all procedures that can be remotely justified as such as the expensive CPT. There are other grifts but this is one way that
health care costs inflate over time.
I don't think either of those are a problem. The problem is that we need more healthcare, more jobs, better jobs, healthier food for the poor, better education, etc. If we have to tax the hardworking doctors, or take more or even most of the billionaire's money, then I'm quite sanguine about that. So be it.
I think using taxes as a weapon against people is wrong though. So - to say that because some billionaire pays a lower tax rate, because his income comes through capital gains, that we must punish him with steeper taxes, or a wealth tax, or whatever plan you suggest, then I believe that is not only unproductive but also immoral to do so.
The basic problem is that the government is a poor steward of our money. Take education as an example. The US spends more money per student when it comes to education, and doesn't have outstanding scores in math, reading, science, or any category that I'm familiar with. There are problems with our education system, it's unequally distributed, it's not preparing kids for the careers of the future adequately, and other problems - but what's the solution? Spend more money, tax more, and so on?
On a similar subject, why should we take more money from the rich, who already pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes, so that we can buy more tanks we don't need, invade foreign countries, overthrow foreign governments, staff military bases around the world, and waste uncountable amounts of money on silly military projects.
