“Second, why not start by actually removing benefits from the poor”
What benefits do you think there are to being poor?
“these people are more likely to invest and create jobs”
CTL was very explicitly referring to people living off of trust funds with no new income, not business owners. I don’t see why there couldn’t be common sense measures to differentiate between business owners and those sitting on their money benefiting nobody.
By the way, a progressive tax rate is not communism. It’s the system used by every civilized country for probably centuries now. If you think the regressive tax systems practiced in the times of feudalism were any better than communism, then I don’t know what to tell you.