I think most people who advocate for flat tax advocate for a single bracket: a flat percentage with a single income deduction, which is asymptotically flat. So e.g. take 15% of (your income - 40k). This would not hurt the poor.

> This would not hurt the poor.

I am always amazed by such statements. Are you sure you have thought this through? What do mean with “asymptotically flat”?

As with the poorly understood correlation/causation relationship in statistics, there are many common misconceptions about how absolute and relative amounts influence the result of mathematical calculations.

The following example may highlight this: Let’s say a person’s minimum financial need to simply stay alive and sane is $X. Now, take two almost identical people that only differ in their income: A’s income is bigger than B’s.

If you tax them both at a flat 15% (or any other rate), the richer will always benefit more from this than the poorer! The reason is because living, eating, and taking part in a society do not come for free.

Surprisingly, this is commonly not well understood and it also seems there are proclivities by some fellow rich and comfortable folk to intentionally avoid understanding this.

Proof by example: Let’s see what their effective tax is after all the cost to stay alive has been deducted.

Excess Income = Income * (1 - 15%) - X

Let’s say A’s income is $150k and B’s is $40k, and the minimum amount X required to simply stay alive (not being homeless and having health insurance included) would be $25k. These figures are obviously simplified but anyone can feel free to use their own numbers and repeat the calculation. The general result will remain similar.

Then, A’s excess income will be $102.5k and B’s $9k. Relatively speaking, A will have made almost 11.5 times the amount of excess income than B, despite making not even four times as much as B (3.75 to be exact).

Excess income will be the only thing both of them can use to save and invest, purchase a house, or use it for all kinds of safety-net building and stress-reducing things.

What about a flat tax, where everyone is required to pay 15%...however everyone is guaranteed a minimum of 50k per year income, so if you earned 40k, you'd get a 10k credit.... which would likely offset all the taxes you did pay.

I think CEO pay should be pegged to average salaries too, and their tax bracket pegged to the differential between average salary in their company and some universally accepted "happiness" wage ...(like 70k I heard a few years back, but is probably closer to 80k now)..

If the average salary in your company is 50k, then you need to pay 30% extra in taxes. There also should be some sort of conversion from stocks to assumed 'income', so that the rich can't just use stocks to subvert paying taxes...

I think securities-based lending should be subject to income tax too.

Everything you wrote is mathematically true no matter how you arrange your tax brackets unless you want brackets with negative marginal post tax income. So what is your point?

The point is (also mathematically speaking) that a flat tax is less fair to the poor than having a progressive tax with a zero marginal tax for incomes below what’s required for merely surviving (i.e. no tax for people without any excess income that can be saved). So there would be room for improvement but, as well-intended as it might be, a flat tax is not making things better for the poor.

You're changing the statement and also using bad logic. The statement was "does not hurt the poor [relative to the current situation]", not "make things better for the poor", or any standard of fairness you've arbitrarily picked. Moreover your logic is flawed, because, doing things one way or the other with taxation of the rich a priori has no effect on the poor, unless you are taking into account secondary effects like price inflation, but if you are I got news for you the government is fucking the poor in those sorts of metrics in far far worse ways than marginal effects downstream of tax policy.

If you're advocating a policy of "screw the rich to help the poor", you've probably never been poor. I have and let me tell you the least of my concerns was what rich people in general were up to with their money (except for the specific rich people that were keeping me employed)

> This would not hurt the poor.

Not sure I follow. I get the first order effects, but I'm hesitant to agree without an explanation of the second-order and systemic-level effects of such a policy.

There are other first order effects that government does (e.g Inflation, arraignments for infractions, vehicle infraction revenue cutting) that drown out those second order effects. Fix those first.

> that drown out those second order effects

What are those?

You suggested them. The only real one I can think of is price inflation, and that's like nothing next to the destructiveness of the fed.

If you don't understand why arraignments for minor violations are awful for the working poor, you've probably never been poor. When I was poor I was lucky enough to not be hurt by arraignments (flexible work hours), but boy did I have sympathy for those people who were relentlessly fucked by that system. There was always at least one of them whenever I had to show up at court, and it wasn't hard to figure out how they got into those situations.

Only for those so poor that they aren't really paying any taxes. It's been estimated that if there were a flat tax that it would only need to be 10% of all corporate and personal income to be effective. Most working class folks pay well over that in the US.

I think "all corporate income" is doing some heavy lifting in that description. It would be a hell of a trick to pass a bill that made business expenses taxable.

Expenses aren't income... But a VAT is basically a tax on business revenue.