Nobody claimed this directly, but when you boil down most progressive policies to their naked objective, it comes down to redistribution in one form or another, taking from the rich and lifting everyone (most noticeably lifting the poor).
Most objections to progressive policies boil down to the idea that the more fortunate people deserve what they have, and that redistribution would make less fortunate people not work as hard. In other words, the world is unfair because of "hand-wavy general incentives".
I am aware that second paragraph was not a great steel-man, and there are many variants and nuances of these positions, but generally the implicit assumption is that we have good (I did not say perfect) vertical mobility, when in reality this is not usually the case.
