"because they can afford to lose it" is no justification for robbery.
17% is the SAME as 17%
Let's try it another way...
A poor person earns, say, $10,000 a year. 17% tax on that is $1,700. He has $8300 left.
A rich person earns, say, $250,000 a year. 17% tax on that is $42,500. He has $207,500 left.
The poor person pays his rent or mortgage, say $500 per month x 12 months = $6,000. He has $2,300 left.
The rich person pays his rent or mortgage, say $2,500 per month x 12 months = $30,000. He has $177,500 left.
The poor person buys his groceries, say $50 a week x 52 weeks = $2600. He's three hundred dollars in the hole. And he hasn't paid for his car's gasoline or insurance yet to get to work, or his health insurance copays and deductibles, or any of the myriad other things most of us must pay for.
The rich person buys his groceries, say $200 a week x 52 weeks = $10,400. He has $167,100 left. Money to pay for gas, car and health insurance, his kid's braces, college fund, retirement account, maybe a little cabin in the woods or on the beach.
I'm not saying that 17% is not 17%. It is. And I agree that taxing people in a punitive way is not a justification for robbery. But is it a justification for taxation? When we tax to raise revenue for the state to function, do we wish to be 'fair' in a mathematical sense, or fair in an 'equally yoked' sense?
Here's a story I heard when I was on Okinawa. I don't know if it's true or not - probably not. It was probably just an apocryphal tale. But it illustrates the issue, I think...
When I got to Okinawa in the early 1980's, I was a Marine MP. We were introduced to our Japanese counterparts, because the USA gave Okinawan US military bases back to Japan in the 1970's. The bases were not sovereign US territory, so crimes committed on base could and sometimes were prosecuted by the Japanese courts. We were told a number of things that I found interesting. One was that the conviction rate was over 90% in Japan. Another was that when you were sentenced to prison, you made paper bags all day long and did not speak. You got one hour of free time per night to write letters home. The rest of the time you were supposed to think about your crime. There was no parole, you did your time, all of it. But here is the kicker. The Japanese treated their prisoners all alike. That means they spoke to the prisoners in Japanese. If you didn't understand what was being said, you learned quickly. You got the same food as the Japanese prisoners; and the same quantity. That was a problem. Japanese, especially Okinawans, were quite a bit smaller than the typical American. And some American convicts died from malnutrition because of it. But the were all treated the same, you see. They all got the same amount of food. If that amount was enough for one person, but another would starve on it, so what? They all got the same.
I see flat tax as kind of the same thing. Insisting on a flat rate is 'fair' from the point of view of math, but some people will starve on it, and others won't even notice. There are many ways to define 'fair', but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this one.
