Let's start with basics.
1. Taxation is theft. Tens of millions of people demanding money from me by coercion is no more moral than one person demanding money from me by coercion.
2. No one has figured out a way to run a country without taxes.
Keeping those in mind -- some comments:
Your profile says you live in Oregon, which does not have "heavy" gasoline taxes by any standard.
Depends on where in Oregon -- counties and municipalities can levy their own gas taxes, so there are places where you're paying taxes to four different government entities/levels when you buy gas (fed, state, county, city).
Also the fact that the poor do not pay taxes is a myth. They pay gasoline taxes, utility taxes, sales taxes, etc.
A fact that must be remembered. It's almost impossible to avoid paying some kind of tax.
And rich pay no tax on the same portion of their income as poor people.
That's a very important item for this discussion! The reference is to the individual exemption, the portion of income exempt from taxes.
But to my buddy, I am now rich. In his mind, I have the ability to pay more, so I should pay more.. And that is the problem at its essence.
But you miss an important factor: why do you have the ability to pay more?
The thread is really more about equality than income. What if someone that made less money than you said you make more than me so you lets punish you . There will always be someone who makes less and some one that makes more.
Why it's Ok to discriminate against the "rich" but is a No No when we talk the "poor" ?
I have always felt this way even when I made minimum wage . Is not about the money but fairness.
Ah, fairness.
Being robbed is not fair -- so taxation is not fair, from the start. That has to be remembered, and is worth repeating: taxation is not fair, from the start. Theft is inherently unfair, so taxation is inherently unfair.
Since we seem stuck with a system which is unfair at root, the question is how to make it the least unfair as possible. As a starting point, consider a regular robbery: someone breaks in to two houses, and from each steals an identical $500 appliance. Both victims take the matter to insurance.
The poor person is screwed, because the policy has a $500 deductible, so he has to somehow scramble to find the money to replace an essential for living. The rich person just pulls out $500 from pocket money and forgets about it.
Now, by one definition, both were treated equally fairly -- but not many people are going to see that the poor guy having to take an extra job, losing sleep and having less time with his family and endangering his health, is fair compared to the rich guy just pulling the cost out of pocket change.
The point is that theft always strikes the poor more heavily, even when the crime is "equal". That is inherently unfair.
So for starters, to have a fair tax system, no theft should be carried out on that amount of income necessary to live decently. How should we measure that? An easy way is to look at the federal poverty level, and take it as a measure of what it takes to live on. Going with that, then here's the first essential piece of a fair tax system: income below the federal poverty level must not be taxed.
But there's a problem, in that the poverty level doesn't actually take into account a number of things it ought to. Perhaps most significant, and therefore a good example, is medical care -- no allowance is made for medical care in determining the poverty level (for that matter, neither is transportation). But if as many politicians say, what we want is a useful and productive citizenry, then we should want every citizen to have good medical care -- so the annual cost of medical care should be added to the poverty line as excluded income.
So roughly the first $25k of personal income shouldn't be taxed; i.e. the individual exemption should be $25k -- to have a fair tax plan. To do otherwise would, from one view, punish the poor for being poor (many of our municipalities excel at this these days).
Then the question of how you earned it arises: did you actually employ your own brains and/or sweat to get the money, or did you rely on other people -- or did you just let your money sit and breed? Right here comes the idea of tax brackets: all income earned by one's own effort should be taxed the same way -- but since it would be exceedingly complex to determine how much income came that way, it's simpler to draw a line and declare that all income less than that is presumed to be literally self-earned. Another line would be drawn to indicate the level at which income earned by employing others -- but still presumably using one's own effort -- lies... and so on.
It isn't hard to make an argument that taxing money made by the efforts of others more highly than just made by one's self is fair -- or that taxing money made merely by having money or property, with no effort involved, even higher is fair.
So should the rich pay more taxes? It would seem fair for them to do so.
