At war with The Province Of Margarine these 40 years.
Those bastards! A pox on their souls!
They have no souls. They’re no True Dairy!
I have in this envelope a list of two hundred and thirty seven Margarinists working within the State Department!
Stranger
I live about twenty metres from a set of traffic lights. I’m on the side road, so my street doesn’t have priority. This means that at any given moment, there is traffic stuck outside my house. And because I moonlight as a transcriptionist, I need silence!. So when the lads with their ultra-mega-bass doof doof are going past, they’ee usually not just going past, but sitting there for three or four minutes (it’s a slow light). My house literally shakes, and the entire room rings like a bell. It’s like living inside a guitar. So I just have to stop work and earn no money for that time. Five minutes later, another car does the same thing (there’s an ethnic group in my area who are really into big sound systems). My landlord lives on the other side of the internal wall. He has a small baby. Christ knows how he feels - at least he’s a cop though, so might have some recourse.
To add to the above - my cop landlord is also a drummer. A LOUD one. He practices most days. And yet I can hardly hear it unless I go to visit him - the old house is quite solid. Makes you wonder what the Doof Doof boys in their cars are doing to their hearing.
Taxes go down for the rich, but only because they’re exaggerated now. What you’re doing is bringing them in line so that everyone pays the same percentage.
Having said that, the rich would still pay the bulk of the country’s taxes.
For example, let’s say rich guy Bill earns $10,000,000 while average guy Joe earns $20,000. At a 20% flat rate, Joe only pays $4,000 in taxes, while Bill pays $2,000,000.
In other words, even with a flat-tax system Bill still contributes as much to the country as as do 500 Joes.
Seems equitable to me.
I’ve never understood how the rationale of taxing high earners at a higher rate ever got off the ground in the first place. No, wait, I do: greedy politicians and vastly higher numbers of average-income-earners/voters. 
Disclaimer: Starving Artist, as the name implies, is not a rich guy.
British public transport may be better than American, but it’s still incredibly inconvenient to use. Edinburgh’s got possibly one of the best public transport networks in the UK (seriously, there’s about 6748930496834737 buses on Princes Street at any one time) but it still takes an age to get anywhere, which is why people still drive.
Compared to Berlin, for example, the UK network is crap.
Airline…food? You must not live in America.
Stupid hijack, I know, but…
Florence to Paris, a 2.5 hour flight, I get a hot meal, even a choice of entree, and actual utensils to eat it with. Philly to LAX, a 5.5 hour flight…if it’s not delayed, HAH!..I get a small bag of pretzels, two if I ask for it, and a soda. Oh yeah, I can buy a freakin’ cold sandwich wrapped in plastic for eight bucks “and we appreciate exact change” if I want.
US$0.65/gallon. And I thank all of you who make it possible.
No less a proponent of free trade and capitalism than Adam Smith proposed a graduated or progressive tax to equalize the tax burden and maximize economic flow. The essential premise behind a progressive tax is that even though the marginal tax rate is higher with increasing income the actual burden (in proportion to income) goes down as those who make more money have more money to dispose as they please. That is, that some guy making $12k a year on minimum wage doesn’t have a dime to spare, but someone making $60k can enjoy a reasonably comfortable lifestyle even at a significantly higher marginal tax rate, and someone making $1.2M is pretty flush with cash even at several times the rate the minimum wage guy could possibly afford.
Let’s look at it another way; ignoring how Congress, like pigs at a trough, spends every tax time they can get their grubby paws on and then proceeds to mortgage away at the future by buying on leveraged credit, the government needs a certain quantity of money to operate, quantity A. Their primary revenue stream for this is via taxation of gross income, which we’ll call B. If we have a flat tax rate r, the equation is simple: A = r*B. However, if we’re humane and don’t want to leave minimum wage workers on the street, r has to be less than or equal to the amount that our hand-to-mouth worker can afford to shell out. This means that A is very significantly limited. If we increase r such that A is then adequate, we penalize the minimum wager, while the middle income maker has to tighten his belt and pull out the Hamburger Helper, and the seven figure guy complains to his friends on the golf course that he can only afford to go to the Caymans three times this year because of “those damned tax-and-spend liberals.”
Even if, from a purely fiscal science standpoint, we don’t care about the guy at the bottom rung, we do care significantly about the middle class; even though their disposal income per capita isn’t great, they represent a huge body of purchasers who buy goods and services rather than squirrel away their money in investments and savings. (Investments and savings are a good bulwark to distribute money and buffer growth, but they tend to take away from the primary circulation of money that keeps the finanical system alive.) Penalizing the middle class by reducing disposable income means that they’ll have less money to spend, thus both prices and demands for goods and services go down, resulting in subsequent deflationary spiral which is checked only by increasing the available M1 money supply (usually by government spending which, in order to avoid exacerbating the problem is done via deficit spending rather than increased taxation or pure fiat).
The fact is that the rich–those with incomes in the >$100,000 range–pay by far the bulk of personal income taxes. (See Table 4 in IRS SOI Tax Stats.) This would be true regardless of what the tax rate on lower workers is. Given again that you have a fixed revenue demand for government operations from income tax, your tax rate to maintain a zero-deficit balance is going to place the bulk of the burden on the upper class. You can increase tax rates on the middle class to reduce taxes above and below, but ultimately you’re shooting your economy in the foot by reducing their disposable income, whereas high taxation on the upper class has relatively little effect on M1 money (although it does have an impact on overall investment funds available for growth). Whatever you do regarding the tax rate on the lower class will actually have a pretty negligable impact on tax revenue, but will increase demands on social services.
In short, regardless of what you believe to be equitable in terms of “everyone carrying their proportion of the burden”, a flat tax either undercuts revenues and encourages deficit spending, or places burdens on the lower and middle classes which negatively effect economic health. From a purely technocratic standpoint, a single income tax rate is a disaster any way you cut it. As a means to maximize revenue while minimizing the overall negative effects on the economy, a progressive income tax is imperative. Now, if you want to complain about unchecked and ill-managed government spending, or the use of the tax code and tax rebates to manipulate political support and misguided attempts as social engineering, I can get behind that, but if you just want to complain that a progressive tax isn’t fair, tough nuts; neither is the fact that the bulk of tax dollars go to complete waste.
Fuck you and the V12 Cadillac you rode in on. 
Stupid oil dependancy. Just wait until I get my Mr. Fusion-powered flying car…
Stranger
Trouble has been churning in that part of the world for a long time. Margarine thinks it can win, but everybody knows they’re going to get creamed. The oddsmakers have been having a tough time of it, though, and nobody knows if Butter will cover the spread.
Sure, but assuming Bill is currently paying 40% on the majority of his income, moving to a flat tax system means there will be a shortfall in total revenue - which will need to be made up by increasing everyone’s rate.
I think it can be reasonably argued that higher earners have more disposable income than lower ones. That may not make it morally right to snatch a bigger slice of it, but in practical term: increase taxes for the Bill and maybe he needs to reconsider the purchase of that second motor yacht or the villa in Provence. Increase taxes for Joe and possibly put his home at risk. One of those options is going to lose you a lot of votes.
Some people argue that we have an interest in encouraging investment. Personally, I think that capital gains income should be taxed at a lower rate than normal income up to a certain cap, and then taxed as normal income above that cap, since the super-rich tend to have ways to make all of their income be capital gains. This would continue to encourage investment by the middle class (say, for retirement), but would make the very rich actually pay a graduated income tax. Warren Buffet claims that his effective tax rate is below that of his secretary’s. I believe it should be higher.
You could also argue that salaries are (effectively) regularly adjusted for inflation, while investments aren’t. If you have a long-term investment that gains 8% a year on average and inflation is 4%, and after many years, you sell and get the profit, you get taxed on 8% “gains”, even though in real terms, you only made 4%. Make the capital gains tax too high, and it starts to become a bad deal to invest. On the other hand, if you get paid $x in salary, you get that money pretty immediately, before inflation has had time to seriously erode its value.
Investment is its own reward.
Don’t hold back; just let it out…