you are flipping back and forth between "income" and "wealth"; but the two are only connected (again) through the habits and events of the income earner. and the notion that you could "more evenly distribute income" is itself ridiculous - because income is generally determined by the individual receiving it. generally you are paid in proportion to your services to others - doing a greater service will reap a greater reward. you can't "more evenly distribute" income any more than you can more evenly distribute people's willingness and ability to serve each other.
Income and wealth are connected. People with higher incomes tend to accumulate higher wealth. People with lots of wealth tend to invest a large chunk of it and thus tend to have higher incomes. You are also making the assumption that income is actually distributed fairly according to what people contribute. That is true to a limited extent, and if we had a perfect market, it would be totally true. Reality is that income is skewed upwards toward those who have greater power, to the point where those who have great power, recieve income that is far above what any true fair market would arive at. Since some people are recieving more income than they actually produce, others neccessarally recive less income than they produce.
When you discuss economics, it's nice to be all theoritical, but you also have to face the fact that the reality is our system is skewed and distorted by non-economic forces, such as corruption, power, and and other human traits. I'm not suggesting that I have a fix for the problem, but I do belive that a highly progressive tax system does tend to limit the income skew.
you're not going to - for the simple reason that fairness is subjective. higher tax rates on the wealthy for some are a cultural issue rather than a revenue one. Others prefer that taxes be generally kept to a minimum necessary to support a government that is also kept minimum necessary, and see no reason why it is "fair" to take from them (or others) more than is minimally necessary. Fair will be based on how you approach government - is it a tool to keep us safe from abuse? or a tool to redistribute wealth? those will give you dramatically different "fair" results.
we are better off sticking with seeking a tax code that works while providing as little drag on it's people as possible.
No, we already have an alternate definition of fair that the majority of Americans accept, and thats called the progressive tax system. It taxes workers who tend to have higher incomes due to power at a higher rate and individuals who have low power and low incomes at a lower rate. Other than public education, it's the one main equalizer of the faults of an imperfect economy.
We have already found an income tax system that "works". What we have now has lasted nearly 100 years (I believe that the progressive income tax system started in 1913), and it has help our economy to outgrow every other economy in the world on a per capita bases. Communism has failed, socialism is proving to have failed in much of Europe, facism failed. We already have the best system in the world, our economic prosperity has proven this to be true, so instead of reinventing the wheel, lets just adjust it to optimize performance.
I am all for some fine tuning of our economic system - reduction in the size of our government over a period of time at a rate that does not impead our recovery from recession, the elemination and/or of most entitlements, eleminating or reducing corporate taxes, taxing capital gains the same way we tax any other income (although I would suggest that we adjust capital gains to account for inflation), reducing the number of tax brackets which we have and increasing the the starting point of the highest tax rate (the "rich" tax) significantly upwards so that only those who actually have an income which is significantly above the norm have to pay the highest tax rate.
