⇥ Why taxes never get fixed

The only truly fair taxation system is one that charges every person the same percentage of their income. That’s it—no exemptions, no tax brackets, no loopholes. If the tax system were like that, the only real way to gain an unfair advantage would be to avoid reporting all your income—which is already illegal in any case.

Better yet, governments would be forced to stop using taxes as a political and social tool—and social programs would become actual expenses reported to the public instead of lost revenue that never materializes and cannot be accounted for.

But this will never happen, because we’ve been taught that a uniform tax system is unfair towards the poor—a ridiculous lie originated by the rich and promptly bought up by everyone else out of convenience.

The much simpler reality is that, deep down, we know that fixing taxes—really fixing them—requires that we (no matter which category we’re in) also give up those privileges that we draw from it. And, of course, nobody, rich or poor, wants to do that.

This is particularly ironic in the case of the middle class, which is really on the receiving end of the shaft, and the geniuses who keep shouting at everyone within earshot that taxes are too high and must be lowered (be which they mean, of course, that they must be lowered for them).

And so, for lack of the simple will to face the actual problem, we live with a situation that is unfair all around—a situation in which someone whose income is well inside the top percentage point of the country can afford to pay an army of clever accountants to find the loopholes to allow him to pay a marginal tax rate that is lower than those in the bottom 20 percent.

Tax rates have nothing to do with it—they’re just a smokescreen thrown up for the masses.