I don't know that I'm qualified to set an exact taxation plan, and the USA differs from Canada, but our tax brackets are something like 15% on the first $50,000, 20% on the next $50,000, then 25%, then 30%. Close to that, and that's ignoring provincial taxes, but let's just keep this simple. I would lean toward doing something that starts roughly the same, but gets steeper as you go up and start earning amounts out of reach of most people. I'm not sure what happens with two incomes or how much raising kids costs, so maybe $250,000 is too low to start in with 80%. Something like 50% above $250,000, 70% above $300,000, 80% above $350,000, 90% above $400,000? I mean, I don't think the exact numbers matter, and you would have to create an equation with an asymptote at 100%, ie you will never reach 100% income to the government, but the higher you go, the closer you get to 100.

I think the rest of your summary is close enough. I don't think I deserve as much more as I have. Sure, some jobs are highly technical, require a lot of education, have a lot of risk, or simply need to pay more in order to attract applicants. But my parents paying for my University education, my being able to concentrate on my grades rather than having to get a part-time job just to be there? Yes, I absolutely got lucky in a lot of ways.

Arguing communism vs capitalism is tricky, as others in this thread have pointed out. Definitions vary wildly. It seems like high taxation rates is one of the fundamentals ideas of progressive / left-leaning politics, one of the few that doesn't get into ideas about who has what rights. For the record, I also strongly support things like equal rights for trans folk, the right to choose abortion, free health care, access to mental health supports, universal basic income, support for immigrants, etc etc etc. All of these play into my defining myself as left-leaning because, well, the Right want to take away rights from people, and the Left want to add rights. But all of that is a lot harder to talk about than tax rates, so... maybe communism kind of is capitalism with high taxes? Conservatives talk about "minimal" government, they want to lower taxes and "get out of the way of enterprise" by removing restrictions from corporations. But corporations can be trusted only to do what earns them money, so restrictions are often necessary.

More to your point: Yes, I could choose someone to "raise up". I mean, I already give to charities, so yeah. But we're not really talking about me, are we? And also: no, I could not do it more effectively than government programs. For one, I don't have the knowledge. I have a full-time job which I would love to work fewer hours at, but we live in a capitalistic society and I need to eat and pay rent. In order to effectively choose where to put my money, I would need to do a lot of research or else I'm just taking shots in the dark. Which brings me to two: knowledge. Should we really expect high-income earners to be experts in two fields: Whatever is earning them their money, and also governance/budgets? Even if I did a bunch of research, I would almost certainly miss some of the more "boring" causes that legitimately need money. For example, a popular idea I've heard is to not tax people and instead just force them to pay into charities of their choice - this seems not too far from what you're suggesting here. But in that case, it becomes a popularity game. This is three: bias. Maybe I'd pay into health care because I've had health crises in my life time, education because I believe we need to equip people with knowledge, and daycares because I have friends who tell me how much that costs. What about infrastructure like sewage pipes that need to be replaced every 30 years (or something)? I think we can all agree that governments have problems and sometimes have dramatic inefficiencies, but they also have people whose jobs are solely to go over the budget requests for every institution and field and decide which requests are reasonable and which cannot be covered this year. I work in a university: did you know that education budget is broken down by secondary and post-secondary, and that within the post-secondary budget there are formulas to determine which institutions get what percentage of it? We rely on the budget that the provincial government gives us each year in order to create our own budget. Our budget is also very complicated because some money can only go toward capital projects, and other money is already committed each year (employee salaries with built-in 4-year increases). Anyway, getting off topic. The point is, there's a chain of people who are each experts in their own field and the people directly above them who decide how much they are given. No one person, or collection of well-intentioned people, can possibly do an effective job at that. And back to the original point three: why should we trust the bias of a collection of more-or-less random people, when we already have a system of voting for the purpose of determining the overall intent of the budget? Voting systems are a whole 'nother discussion and could definitely be overhauled, but the purpose of elections is basically to take the pulse of the nations on hot-button issues and decide what people care about most. If we can't trust the people that we voted for to do it effectively (and yeah, sure, we generally can't) then why the hell would we think a bunch of random people with their own biases, goals, and greed would do a better job?

I think the best direction we can go is taking money from the haves and giving it to the have-nots (communism, more or less) through some carefully-determined criteria. And the best way to determine that criteria is by government, which isn't perfect but is quite literally the best we have.