I'm a little surprised at the comments here on HN. I expected a much less sarcastic and "chip on the shoulder" attitude.

No one is saying that rich people can't afford to pay more taxes. It's not a question of they're going to starve and be out on the streets. The real issue is, approaching 50% taxes (EDIT: state + federal + medicare/medicaid + social security) is in conflict with the American concept of capitalism. The fact of the matter is, there is nothing proportionate about how much you benefit to how much you pay. The more you make, the more you pay to Uncle Sam both as a proportion of your income and as an actual number.

It is not a question of how much can you "afford to give" while remaining well off - I think it's a much more core issue at hand: is someone who makes (to bring this closer to home) $250k as a single individual, perhaps doing freelance software development and consulting, culpable to the tune of $80k out of their salary to help everyone else out?

Yes, it's a moral question. It's a philosophical question. And it's also a legal question: even if they are morally obligated - is it the government's job to enforce that?

Many people I know in that bracket actually give that much or more in very directed donations to non-profit entities (meaning they're no longer in that bracket thanks to tax deductions) because they feel they a) distrust the government to wisely spend their money to solve the problems, b) they should have a say in where their money goes, and c) it is not the government's job to take and redistribute wealth.

As for those that don't make such donations - can you absolutely say they must?

Also remember, these tax hikes are really not targeted at the so-called "filthy rich" that have been the focus of all the ire and angst in recent years by groups such as "Occupy Wall Street" - they just affect the upper middle class. Capital gains taxes are ridiculously lower than income taxes. Your wall street bankers and trust fund babies don't have "income" in the traditional sense. You're not taking this money from people that have invested money and are making more money explicitly not doing anything, these taxes are on the upper class of working citizens.

The biggest targets are small business owners, startups, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and others of their kind. Can you say for an absolute fact that they owe ~40% of their annual income to the government? I can tell you for a fact that the difference between a freelancer in high demand earning $250k/year vs $100k/year is a matter of the hours you work. If you kill yourself to work around the clock to make more money.... you are rewarded with higher taxes. It's not a different class of people that are being taxed higher - it's just people that have worked harder for longer and are, as a result, more well off. This is literally the anti-thesis of core American values: work harder and be, quite frankly, punished for it.

(I'm not saying everyone can automatically make $250k/year by working harder and that if you don't make that much then you are lazy - I'm saying the difference between $50k/year and $350k/year is a matter is a matter of quantity, not type; whereas the difference between $250k/year and $200MM/year is a different beast.)

At the end of the day, people need to decide if you are paying for services provided by the government or if we are asking the upper middle class to subsidize the rest of the country. There's nothing inherently better or worse about one or the other - it's a matter of philosophy. At the end of the day, are our core principles capitalistic or socialistic? There's something to be said for both, and I'm not saying it's wrong to have socialistic taxes such as those that were just recently repealed in France - but if that's the case, we need to own up and admit that is what we want.

It is an exercise in futility to ask to levy taxes on the middle class and above to subsidize the cost of a welfare nation while pretending that is not the case. If that's what you want to do, fine. Nothing in the constitution (despite what your favorite talk show might say) says a thing (explicitly) about capitalism vs socialism one way or the other. It's a democracy and we're free to choose our own path. But let's not do one thing while pretending to be another.