'Cos I've yet to hear any flat tax adherents volunteer to give up their writeoffs. My mother likes to cite the fact that his last year in office GHWB paid a lower PERCENTAGE tax than she did despite earning pretty close to that ten times as much figure you suggest. But he didn't have to worry about how he'd pay medical bills if he broke his leg in three places, or rent, or put food on the table, and wasn't working a part time job five nights a week after his full time job concluded. Talk to me about "fair" particularly as applied to compensation for work.

Indeed, state and other local taxes usually take nearly as much of peoples earnings as federal income tax, even though they don't have to do things like provide and equip standing armies, yet which draws the most complaints? In my admittedly limited experience complaints about taxation seem to be inversely proportional to their cause, with federal and state taxes drawing most of the ire even though the far more directly controllable county and municipal taxes usually represent as great a share of the tax burden with a lot less return on the investment.

As an aside, counting Social Security isn't entirely fair, since it's not money being forever taken from you, it's money being set aside at interest that you'll receive back at retirement; another of my objections to Reagans tax "reforms" is taxing Social Security payments for those on disability or and reducing payments to retirees who contribute to the economy by taking jobs. People paid income tax on that money when they earned it; why should they pay income tax on it AGAIN when it's returned?

That's not exactly my specialty; without knowing your income, expenses, assets and all of the same data for the nation as a whole I can't offer a quote.