Even with a "flat tax" the rich will still pay less than the poor.

The problems with taxation is that you can't tax gross income.

A business with sales receipts of $1,000,000 has to buy $800,000 worth of stuff to sell, and its net income is thus only $200,000 - which is all it has at the end of the year to pay taxes with. You must provide some way to allow for the costs of doing business.

The rich will continue to figure out ways to get Congress to allow them more generous reductions of their income for "expenses," while the working stiffs will continue to pay the tax on all (or very nearly all) of their wages. The reason that the high income people pay relatively very little in taxes is because, through manipulating of "costs of business" they have zero taxable (net) income - on paper.

Even though the highest tax bracket now taxes income above where the bracket changes at 28%, income from investments held more than a year is taxed as "capital gains" at 15%, so the person who's able to live off investment income pays (.15/.28) about at about half the rate of the person who lives off current (wage) income. It could be very difficult to change the code so that a working investor making a million every year pays a fair share on current income without wiping out the life savings of the retiree withdrawing a living income from a lifetime of savings.

This is not a simple thing to change since the capital gains rate also applies to things like the net gain from selling a home, which significantly affects everybody, regardless of income level. (The current code includes an "exemption" for modest homes, which is reasonable fair, but a "clean slate" restart on things isn't likely to catch all such special conditions.)

There's no magic solution that you can put in a trite quip in a speech, since "the devil's in the details," and the current tax code contains about 35,000 pages of "details." Many of these have very good reasons for being there, but a whole bunch of them are just gravy for the (fat) cats. The only realistic and rational way to fix it is to rewrite the whole thing, and we don't elect many people who can do simple arithmatic, much less even talk about fair taxation.

John