A flat tax would be great in principle, but given reality an effective government trying to use one would demand greater than 100% taxes from a lot of people. It's not really feasible, and if somebody's got to carry a greater burden, it might as well be the one who can bear it. Kind of like how you wouldn't insist on a human child to "do its share" helping a family move, and haul the same percentage of its body weight as a horse.
It's not like a rational person would think of high taxes on high income as a disincentive to earn a high income. If you're taxed 40% of your income over $100,000, and you make $200,000 you're still taking home $60,000 more than if you hadn't earned that second 100k in the first place.
You could argue that a proper government's expenses wouldn't be so high because it would be smaller, and thus avert this, but I'm skeptical of that and will have to first be convinced that it would be acceptable to gut the government enough to bring the tax rate to 0 (let's say they get by on donations or something), given the number of poor who already live paycheck-to-paycheck while not paying taxes because they don't have a large enough income. Since these people, and those poorer, would not be able to survive additional expenses (such as any tax at all), your plan either has to accommodate them or discard them. And you're not likely to convince me that the latter is justified.
First of all: I don't want to tax everyone 100%; I want to tax everyone, for example 5%, or 10%.
I think that most people can afford that.
Most can, but many can't. Poverty, and all that - I'm actually pretty well off, relatively speaking, and the only time I have ever had more than 500 bucks in my bank account was immediately after student loans came in. I've frequently had to deal with 20 for 2 weeks. And again, I am in fine shape, financially.
There are people, a lot of them, worse off than that, and paying even an extra 5 to 10 percent of their income in taxes wouldn't be possible unless they received a commensurate raise - if they're employed. And how many of them have to rely on government assistance to get by as it is? Yes, they
ought to pay for it, but in the world of choosing whether to buy your son's medicine or keeping the heat on or pay your taxes... What ought to be isn't always what you end up with.
So you have one end of the spectrum that
cannot pay their tax dues, any more than a stone can bleed. At the other end, you're slashing the income tax paid by the people that can afford to pay it, and a lot more besides, without any significant difference in their quality of life.
You're not really doing anything for the poor (other than making them even less likely to be able to claw their way out of their current status, no matter how many 16 hour days they and every other member of the family works for minimum wage or less), you're not really changing what the middle class pays either way, you're doing amazingly kind things for people who could care less either way, and you end up with a government whose income can't support its spending without hurting the poor and the middle class even more.
@Nadaka
Ah, crap, I did get mixed up. Bleh, sickness and all that. Addles my wits. The earlier bits of this post are pretty obtuse, too, for which I apologize and hope my intent gets across. A flat tax of over 100% would be nonsensical and it doesn't make sense to speak of some groups having different flat tax rates.
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