That doesn't really hold water when we are discussing taxes on income.
If they use the roads more, they buy more gas that is taxed to pay for the roads.
If they use more police protection (I am assuming because they have nicer stuff and bigger houses) they pay higher property taxes for it.
sceintific research? seems grasping at straws but even so I fail to see how a wealthy person benefits more from a cure for cancer than a middle class person.
Does someone who pays 300K in federal income taxes use 300,000 times more services than someone who basically pays nothing? of course not.
You're mixing up your terms TD. That would be a FLAT tax, not a progressive tax. If everybody paid x%, that would be a flat tax. What you are actually arguing for is something nobody actually contends makes sense openly- a regressive tax. You want the wealthy to pay a lower percentage. That is actually what we have now. Income tax on wages is progressive, but the primary sources of income on the wealthy- inheritance and investment- are much lower than taxes on wages, so as people move up to the very top they actually pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes. Also, sales taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, vehicle taxes, FICA, etc, are regressive. Overall the system we have in the US is regressive. You apparently want it to be even more regressive...
So, lets walk through both arguments. First, why is a flat tax better than a regressive tax. Income IS the benefit you are withdrawing from society. That's what it is- the amount of money you are able to pull out of society. So, it makes sense that, at the least, you would pay back in in proprotion to the value you derive from that system. If society collapsed, everybody's income would be zero, so the value of society to somebody economically is proportional to their income and how much reason somebody has to prevent that society from collapsing or encourage it growing is therefore proportional to their income. That is pretty obvious, which is why nobody actually defends regressive taxation.
But, the more complex part is the arguments for why progressive taxation (the wealthy pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the rest of us) is better. Probably the strongest argument in favor of progressive taxation is decreasing marginal utility. Basically, the idea is that a dollar is worth a whole lot more to somebody living in poverty than it is to somebody who is uberwealthy. Where, say $1,000 could for somebody in poverty mean the difference between having sufficient shelter or not, for somebody who is uberwealthy they wouldn't actually even notice if their bank account balance went down by $1,000. They might not even notice a spare $100,000 disappearing from their bank account. Likewise, a person living in poverty might be willing to work for 200 hours to get that $1,000, where an uberwealthy person might not be interested even in working for 1 hour to get $1,000. The value they recieve from that money is radically less. So, if you want to optimize the system for utility, you are far better off pulling money from the top than the bottom.
There is also just a practical argument. People living in poverty don't have much money. If you want to have a vibrant and prosperous society for everybody, your only real option is to draw the money from where the money is- in the hands of the uberwealthy.
And, there is also a question of fairness. The economic system has a fairly arbitrary aspect. Who ends up uberwealthy and who ends up in poverty is partly a result of level of effort or intellect or whatnot, but it is also partly a result of random luck. Maybe the uberwealthy person had the good fortune to be born wealthy, where the poor person had the misfortune to be born poor. Maybe the uberwealthy person had the good luck to have gotten their first job in a company that just happened to take off, where the poor person had the bad luck to have started out in a company that soon tanked. Maybe the wealthy person happened to make a lucky decision early in life that the poor person didn't. And so on. Now, that isn't to say that it is ALL luck. It isn't. But it is PARTLY luck. So, progressive taxation is a way to counteract the impact of good or bad luck. By taking part of the income derived from those at the top and less from those at the bottom, you are softening the blow of bad luck by reducing the benefit of good luck slightly.
There is also an argument about opportunity. In a flat or regressive system it is much harder for somebody born on the bottom of the scale to make it to the top than in a system with progressive taxation. There are fewer opportunities for somebody at the bottom with a regressive or flat tax system because there just isn't funding for those opportunities, and at the same time, in a regressive or flat tax system, the guy at the bottom is having more of their wealth sucked away by taxes. While progressive taxes do not really effect the level of opportunity for somebody at the top, they do increase the opportunities for people at the bottom, which benefits everybody. If the next Einstein is born into poverty, we all benefit by having a system in which he is more likely to rise to fame than in one where he is more likely to be working in a taco bell.
