> In some places $400k can give 8 families this life. In others not even one. It depends.

Ummm, where exactly in the world is $400k per year not enough to survive? Monaco?

If you earn $400k year after year, then you are earning enough to be "rich". But true, it's still possible to live beyond your means regardless of how much you earn and incur financial difficulty.

There’s a wide world between “survive” and the lifestyle I described. A wider universe between that lifestyle and “rich.”

In San Francisco it's just about striking distance to the lifestyle I described. The commutes and the housing are generally a little worse.

In San Francisco a family can absolutely make do with $400k annual income, have a home, go to decent schools, put kids through college, save for retirement, etc. You wouldn't have to live in and commute from Oakland. You could still amass sufficient wealth to be considered "rich" by the time you retire. Average household income in SF is something near $135k. $400k is well well above that.

However, as I mentioned above, that same family (or even one that earns millions more) could easily put themselves into financial difficulty if they live beyond their means.

With $400k annual income you couldn't buy a single family home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood and if you had many children perhaps you couldn't afford to send them all to Harvard, but if you lived reasonably within your means you could certainly still be considered "rich".

> In some places $400k can give 8 families this life. In others not even one. It depends.

Can you name a place, anywhere in the world, where $400k/yr is not enough to survive for one family?

inside a volcano

As noted this is not really true in most locations, but I still would not feel bad about the person earning $400k. They live in a desirable location. They can move if they wish.

They live in a productive location. When they leave it their productivity collapses.

I understand it’s emotionally satisfying to see them deprived, but the government also ends up with less revenue when they apply their skills to lower impact projects.

This is a specious argument. You can't measure expenditures that go solely to retaining the exclusive use of desirable land as productivity.

Large engineering firms have offices in various Midwestern states that are just as productive as SV, NY, what have you.

High-wage-high-cost and medium-wage-medium-cost arrangements are on balance pretty similar for the employee. Dramatically higher taxes on the former will push people to the latter. Which, as you note, they can do without even changing employers. There might be some lens through which this is good. Decentralization, or inequality. But tax revenue from this cohort will go down, not up, because there’s so much less income to tax in the first place.