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Originally Posted by host
Power imbalance.....are you referring to glaring disparity in U.S. wealth
distribution?
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In a sense.
There is the common knowledge argument that it is both unfair to people without money that the people with money have their taxes decreased and unfair to people with money that they pay proportionally more than people without money.
Both are incorrect.
It is a question of fairness, but not in the I-can't-buy-stuff-and-you-can kind of way. It is an issue of fairness in power within this country, a capitalist democracy (and for all those reading, please spare me the "but we're a republic, not a democracy speech"). The vast majority of politicians are upper class, and the higher you go, the higher they go in their class. Most information the middle and lower classes receive is filtered through companies owned by people in the upper class, and the more people you can reach through your company, the higher you go in your class. So, essentially, the upper class is the gov't and the information the middle and lower classes receive about the people they elect is controlled by the upper class. The only way such a system would not lead to a power imbalance favoring the upper class is if humanity was essentially kind and greed-free. Alas, this is obviously not the case. Progressive taxation is a (very small and highly ineffective but) necessary method of restoring some degree of balance to the power structure of our society. The upper class, by virtue of controlling everything, filtered somewhat (some might say, marginally) through the election process, will promote itself. This is done in many ways - including the use of spreading the concept that it is "unfair" to require the upper class to pay larger percentages of their income to society. This is then furthered by the strange concept that rich = hard working and poor = lazy.
Progressive taxation is a very imperfect, but required, solution to this power imbalance problem.
Maybe when we're all greed-free, we can institute a flat tax. But then, if we're greed-free, we could probably just continue our society off of donations and get rid of the mandatory tax thing alltogether.