If you make $400k a year, you are rich/wealthy. If you don't feel it, re-examine your lifestyle and whether you are actually spending your money well, maybe you're buying too much avocado toast /s
1. TC numbers (hypothetically ~$400k as you quoted, which generally agrees with levels.fyi) are not real income. We know what happened to (tech) equity this year --- this (unfavorable) gap between grant price/share and vesting price/share has deflated a lot of the TC, much more so if the grant date happens to be right before the onslaught. (Personally I landed almost square in this territory due to a somewhat forced job switch but that's another can of worms I'm not opening today).
2. Whatever is left from that TC number, tax man takes ~40% of it period. Deductions are for most cases a rounding error.
3. TL;DR housing costs scales with salary over here too. Long version: The kind of housing that (transplanted) SWEs and their families would reasonably consider in SFBay has generally been priced (by "the market") right up to the limit of their income-derived affordability, most of which is calculated (by the underwriters) straight from SWE base salary, which we know is constrained by BigTech paybands (which propagates to startups too).
4. Okay, now an inevitable personal finances bullet point: Educated responsible adults as we are, a significant savings (incl. investments) rate surely sounds prudent eh? Say (temporary) goodbye to another xx% of whatever's left at this point.
5. Adding insult to injury, avocado toasts are now about 1.5x to 2x their price compared to early 2020. I feel compelled to add that this agrees with the larger trend of any kind of prepared food.
6. Elephant in the room: Kids.
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I can go on and on, but hopefully I am getting the point across. The "salary man" of today has not only his theoretically big TC "pie" shrink over time, but an increasingly larger slice of it becomes marked as non-disposable. Assuming reasonable (not necessarily optimal) personal finances management and maintaining a reasonably high QotL (nothing excessive), I don't see me or my similarly positioned peers feeling rich / upper-middle-class-y any time soon.
Lots of income may not make you wealthy but it lets you live a rich lifestyle. Move somewhere cheaper if you aren’t meeting your savings goals.
How do you tax someone buying a Congressperson?
How do you tax someone using their wealth as a threat, as a shield, so that they don't have to participate in the same kind of society as the rest of us, and can enjoy "privilege" (lit. "private law")?
Wealth at rest is not immaterial, and taxing profits or consumption will never work to reduce wealth inequality or the disproportionate power the wealthy have over the rest of us.
Basically, I'm fine with paying more taxes, but only if those wealthier than me pay more still.
