The only reason you are near the top tax bracket is Bush Jr eliminated all the higher brackets in the name of encouraging growth (despite the fact that the economy has grown equally fast historically under both higher and lower tax rates.)
Quote:
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I don't mind people above me getting a tax break.
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Now, I already agree that spending is too high. We could cut the budget in half if we reduced the military by 4/5ths (which would still give us the highest military budget in the world), nationalized all health care, and payed down our massive debt.
But given a particular amount of spending, that money has to come from somewhere. If you give the rich tax breaks, the middle class has to make up for it. You can't get it by taxing the poor. They don't have it.
Consider that the top 1% holds as much wealth as the entire bottom 90%.
A flat tax simply could not generate the revenue to run government services. Because the income distribution is top heavy, the tax rate
has to be top heavy as well.
Another hypothetical example:
lower class guy: 10k
middle class guy: 75k
upper class guy: 250k
Progressive tax:
10k * 10%: 1k
75k * 30%: 22k
250k * 60%: 150k
total income: 173k
flat tax:
10k * 20%= 2k
75k * 20%= 15k
250k * 20%=50k
total: 67k
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I think this is why the radical right has been able to get away with the changes they have made the past few decades which caused the gross income inequality we see today:
the middle class imagines that it is, or will soon be, wealthy, and so vote to support measures which help the wealthy. Meanwhile, they are the very people most hurt by those policies as someone has to take up the slack.