The nice explanation is that if you’re doing well, you may be happy to pay lots of taxes so others can do well too.
The selfish explanation is that you want to live in a community with low crime and high trust, which requires a certain baseline living standard for everybody.
Only with the, in my experience uniquely American, idea that people can’t possibly be in against a policy or situation if they’re not immediately short-term personally hurt by it do you need this doublethink that tech staff at Meta are being oppressed.
No. The senior software engineer at Meta and the CEO can both afford a comfortable lifestyle. Yes the CEO can afford a more comfortable lifestyle, but they're still limited by things like health. The blue collar worker earning $30k a year is in a different position entirely.
I know both people who are very rich and people who are poor. The very rich and the senior-engineer types both live comfortable lives. Yes the very rich can have more luxuries if they so desire, but who cares? Not even they do...
The poor live a different life: Freezing winters without heating, 8°C inside their home. No access to warm water. Calculating cost vs calories for food they buy so they get the calories while spending as little as possible.
The senior software engineer at Meta has far more in common with a blue collar guy living paycheck to paycheck than he has with a CEO whose wealth grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.
I've said this before but the way I see it, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".