[turtleofdeath]

I know this is unrelated to the post but I am genuinely/respectfully curious (since you left it as a bullet) as to the chain of logic that makes it okay to tax higher income people more. I've never understood that.

Full disclosure: if it were up to me, we would go with either a flat tax or something more sensible that an economist has proposed (i.e. Friedman's negative income tax). But that would, of course, largely abolish the need for the IRS and the thousands of jobs tied to figuring out taxes each year. In other words, I am definitely more keen on a strong vector toward Libertarianism.

[kasey_junk]

Higher tax rates impact the quality of life of higher income earners less than lower income earners.

An extreme case would be that someone who earned a billion dollars and paid a 99.9% tax on it would still be much better off than someone who earned 16K and paid a negative 1% rate.

[lackbeard]

That's a true statement, but there's no logic here or reasoning as to why that makes it okay.

[kasey_junk]

Oh, you want me to explicitly state it?

The starting premise is that taxes should be judged based on how they impact your quality of life, not on how much quantity of money they take.

Logically then, progressive taxes are better.

[lackbeard]

But that just shifts the question on to the starting premise. What is the chain of logic that leads you to conclude that it's correct to tax people based on how the taxes impact the quality of their life?

[kasey_junk]

That becomes a moral judgement and doesn't follow from logic. Other alternatives also flow from moral judgements. There is no logical basis for taxing people on a fixed amount of a fixed percentage either. All of them appeal to a sense of fairness which is not a logical construct.

This is a widely debated topic that usually devolves into an argument about whether property is some sort of natural right or if it is a societal construct. Even on the natural rights side of the argument you will find adherents that believe any taxation is a violation of their natural rights.

I'm pretty uninterested in traveling the paths of Hobbes and Kant on an internet forum, so suffice it to say that its pretty clear to most people that there is a societal benefit to taxes and a societal desire to make those "fair". Arguing over what is more fair is unlikely to be resolved by logical proof but a lot of people think quality of life impact is the fair option.