Why would he advocate that? So that wealth can be redistributed, of course.
We are long past the point where any reasonable allocation of government benefits would show that "the rich" would benefit at all from raising taxes. All of the tax revenue from such a rise in rates, if it generated any incremental revenue at all, would go to those further down the income scale.
If your household makes less than ~$85K, regardless of the fact that you pay taxes, you get back more in benefits than you pay in taxes. Above that, you are paying above and beyond any reasonable allocation of benefits. I know that some extremists will say that the military only benefits war-profiteers, but come on, every American benefits from lower oil prices and consumer goods prices due to the American military. Our main problem is that we can't stop other nations from free-riding on that military presence. How much does a guy like Romney benefit from government spending, though? He's certain a beneficiary of true public goods like roads, but does he use them hundreds of times more frequently than someone who pays 1% of the amount of tax Romney pays? No, because to do so, he would have to dedicate his entire life just to using roads built with Federal dollars. So the guy pays $2 million in taxes, gets, what, at most $500K in benefits, and people still give him sh!t?
It's repellent to talk about a "fair share" of taxes without talking about a fair share of benefits. When Obama says that some people have prospered disproportionately, so they should pay more, well, those people prospered in private transactions, not at the expense of the state. It's complete and utter demagoguery. If anyone should be complaining about Mitt Romney's wealth, it's the people on the other side of those Bain Capital transactions. Find me a rich guy who made his money ripping off the government (good example was that company in Massachusetts that sold the government a bunch of crappy cement mix that led to some deaths in the tunnels built during the Big Dig) and there's a guy who needs to pay more to reach his "fair share". A guy like Romney, though, even if I were in the income bucket where I benefit more from taxes paid than I paid in, I would be against a policy of raising his taxes.
I'd rather earn my own way in this world than rely on people like Barack Obama to earn it for me by stealing from someone else. That's the only honorable stance.
