[bobwaycott]

The basic point in simplest form is that the less money a person earns, the greater the impact of paying 20% of their income in taxes is in terms of real dollars left to live on.

A family earning $50K will have $40K left after federal taxes to live on. A family earning $250K will have $200K left to live on. One of these families is hurt more than the other by a flat tax. This is what is meant when a flat tax is criticized as being regressive.

[Cshelton]

Thanks for the explanation of what he meant. I was thinking more macro, but by regressive, people seem to mean the micro aspect of it. I don't believe it would take a very complicated tax code, if we started over, to make sure the lower brackets are not regressive. Even just using standard deductions, child tax credits (cost of living higher), etc.

A single "family" of one making 50k though should most likely be paying their portion of tax, whatever the tax rate is. At some point an individual has to be accountable and live within their means.

So in the end, the tax rate would be flat, but effective tax rate would not.

[dlp211]

If you are just going to carve out a bunch of exemptions, which is what actually makes that tax code difficult in the first place, to end up with the same outcomes that we have now, why change anything? It would actually be even more difficult to get the exemptions right since there would have to be more, they would have to be higher, and their phase outs would be more complicated.

Also, a single "family" of one, pays more in taxes today then say a family of four with 2 kids earning the same household income. Apologies ahead of time if I misconstrued your argument.