that again is not true. Catawba posted an article from the NYT that noted those in the top one percent (the vast majority who made between a million and five million a year) paid the highest effective income tax rates and Oldreliable67 posted evidence that the top one percent had the highest overall federal (all federal) tax rates.
I don't think you're reading what I am saying carefully because that does not contradict what I am saying.
what is wrong with regressive? especially since the rich pay far more ACTUAL tax dollars. Life is regressive. Do you believe in FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITY
Regressive taxes are pretty much unsupportable from any perspective. Some of the many reasons progressive taxes are better:
1) Diminishing marginal utility of wealth. The more money somebody has, the less utility it has. Every economist in the world would agree with this. If you have $100, you spend it on the $100 worth of items you want the very most. If you have $200, you spend it on the $100 worth of items you want the most and then the $100 worth of items you want slightly less than the first ones. So, letting all the money accumulate in the pockets of very few is extremely wasteful.
2) Too much concentration of wealth undermines consumption and productivity. The economy relies on having a large middle class that is educated and prosperous enough to be productive at work in an information economy and to buy the products they create. When too much wealth gets soaked up by too few, the middle class's ability to play those roles falls apart.
3) Too much concentration of wealth undermines the incentive to work hard. As the wealth gets more and more concentrated it becomes harder and harder to cross the gulf between regular people and rich people. For example, the difference between the type of education a regular person can get and the education a rich person can get becomes so wide that a regular person would really struggle to perform as well at a job as a person born rich. In particular, with regressive taxation, it becomes harder and harder for a middle class person to save up any money, so starting a business if you were not born rich becomes very hard. All these effects make it futile to work hard if you aren't born rich. We aren't at that point, but we're heading in that direction. When somebody works 80 hours a week and brings in some big customer and delivers a service to them or invents something or whatever, and some rich dude they never met gets 95% of the profit generated, they aren't going to work so hard the next day.
4) Society has expenses that need to be paid. Maintaining the foundations of our society cost money. Most the money is in the hands of the very rich. If we don't tax the very rich adequately we inevitably get big deficits, which is bad for everybody.
5) Morally it just plain isn't right to give special advantages to people who already have a lot at the expense of the well being of people who are having a harder time. This is one of those things that just seems to inherently obvious to me, but I guess some on the right don't share that basic moral belief...
6) Poverty is inefficient. The average American generates almost $3 million worth of GDP in their lifetime. Even somebody who works at McDonalds for their whole career generates almost $2 million in GDP. Somebody who spends their whole life in poverty may generate $0 GDP. That is an enormous waste. If we can help a person get out of poverty with progressive taxation and safety net spending, that is almost always a hugely rewarding investment economically.
7) The rich benefit way, way, more from government. For example, if the federal government spends $1 trillion on bailouts, that may have a very small effect on the average person. Maybe they get rehired 2 weeks earlier or something. But for somebody with a $10 billion stock portfolio, their net worth may go up 20% or $2 billion. Likewise, an individual only benefits from their own education, where somebody who owns a company benefits from the educations of every single employee. A rich person has more to defend, so national defense benefits them more. And so on.