For the sake of combining growth with equality, don't tax the goods and services we make, tax the finite natural resources people take (and tax/reform other finite things too!)
(Third time's the charm)
For an explanation, here's a snippet of a description explaining why taxing the unearned income of finite assets like land can achieve both efficiency and equity without needing to tax and punish the work of laborers or investments into truly productive capital:
>One way is to realize that wealth not only consists of producible capital, but also of non-producible (or “fixed’’) factors. Fixed factors generate rents—that is, payments in excess of what is needed to sustain production. Taxing these rents can enhance efficiency and, potentially, reduce inequality
>...
>In the first way, one prominent example of a rent-generating fixed factor is land.((Monopolies also generate rents, since they can overcharge consumers due to their lack of competition. This practice increases inequality and reduces productivity in the long term. A detailed discussion on the relationship between monopolies and inequality can be found on this blog in an interview with Angus Deaton.)) The owner of a piece of land in a major city can charge a much higher rental rate than the owner of a piece of land somewhere in the countryside, simply because urban land is scarce. Its value is derived from the totality of benefits of being in a city. In economics, it is common knowledge that taxing land is not distortionary, i.e., there is no efficiency loss from it. The reason is that, as an approximation, scarce urban land is fixed: Land owners cannot pass on a land tax through higher prices. The supply of urban land is inelastic—that is, a price increase will not affect its supply—while its demand is not.
>Feldstein (1977), however, discovered that a tax on land rents can indeed be distortionary, by inducing a shift in the portfolio of investors when they hold more than one asset. Edenhofer et al. (2015) show that such a “portfolio effect” can be welfare-enhancing if there is too little capital in an economy relative to aggregate consumption, both by increasing growth and reducing inequality between generations.
There are also other sources of economic rent from finite assets which we can tax or otherwise reform (especially artificially finite things (e.g. patent rights to a specific innovation) since we can undo the human-made laws which made them so in the first place). The rents that accumulate to resources and privileges with a fully fixed supply are a hidden devil for our economy to deal with, and whatever revenue we do collect can be used to untax the goods and services people make. We can have more growth with greater equality, we just need to set the incentives straight on rewarding producing for others and recompensing taking the finite from others.