Title: Is there any moral justification for our Progressive Income Tax System? - Quora
Headings: Is there any moral justification for our Progressive Income Tax System?
Is there any moral justification for our Progressive Income Tax System?
Tom Byron
Scott Steward
Geoffrey Widdison
Quora User
Rebecca Warner
Paul Baumann
Alex Butcher
Moe Min
Quora User
Jason MacDonald
Quora User
Chris Joosse
Stephen Lewis
Quora User
Jeff Franz-Lien
Raghavendra Rao
Lokesh Nandanwar
Frank Hummer
Jonathan Andrews
Paul Testa
Shankar

Content: Progressive taxation is an attempt to share the burden of taxation fairly, even if this is not the same thing as sharing it equally. As Claes-Bertil Lewau describes in his answer, it’s often implemented as different tax bands, so the higher rate of tax only applies to income above a certain level - NOT to the individual’s entire income. So, with few exceptions (e.g. losing eligibility to a welfare benefit above a certain threshold), if you earn more, you still take home more. That’s the ‘how’. As for the ‘why’ - if you have an income of £30,000 per year, and your neighbour has an income of £3,000,000 per year, you could have a flat-rate tax, of, say, 25%, and you would be left with £22,500 for the year, and your neighbour would be left with £2,250,000. If the state needs to collect more tax,
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Moe Min
, works at Wells Fargo
Answered 8 years ago · Author has 624 answers and 1.3M answer views
Is there any moral justification for our Progressive Income Tax System? Moral justification for progressive taxation rests on the following: Progressive taxation is deemed to be fair by vast majority of the citizens in America. [ 1]
Concept of 'fairness' like any other social beliefs evolve over time and the Constitution is amended to reflect these changing views. It was just 100 years ago that the Federal Income Tax was codified in the 16th Amendment. [