Problem is that those who do not pay taxes will vote to increase someone else's taxes and give it to them.
Perhaps, but the system we have now is that the guys who have most of the wealth and earn most of the income can pay to have candidates elected that keep cutting their taxes and will end up making the guys at the bottom and their children make up the shortfall.
It's one thing to raise some "evil rich guy (apparently that is making $200K or more according to our Dear Leader Obama) but it's another to raise their own taxes. So the entire nightmarish budget is fallen on the middle income earners, yet again.
Those that make $200 and more make up about 3% of the population. It is a rarified level of income. Put another way, 97% of people make less than that. So, in what group do you think the middle income earners sit? Perhaps within the 97%?
Tell me how you fairly tax income in Canada?
Well, the situation in terms of comparing the two countries taxes is complicated by the fact that, in both countries the federal rate is not the income tax there is. The Provinces of Canada along with most States, levy their own income tax as well. Further there are sales taxes and property taxes that vary by jurisdiction.
On the whole, between the two countries if you are in the middle your taxes are comparable. At the higher end the Canadian taxes are higher, supposedly, but you won't see this in the tax brackets. In the US the rates on the brackets are higher but there are more things you can deduct in the US which lowers what you pay.
Also, how much do "rich" earn per year vs "middle income earners" make? You keep throwing out terms that have no definitions and it's hard for me to reply to you when I don't know what your definitions are. For me, I make it easy, I look at "rich" is when they gross $1M USD per year. Anything under that down to $40K-$50K is middle class and some level of poor below that.
The level of grossing $1M USD per year is also meaningless. For example, rich people in Canada don't get paid in USD as much as Americans do. Rich Germans also don't get paid in USD.
A rich guy in Bangladesh can earn substantially less than $1M USD or local currency equivalent and still be really really rich locally. Rich is not an absolute term but a relative term. If everyone in the US earned a million bucks a year there would be no rich people in the US.
The rich and the poor can only be compared on their purchasing power, rather than on a dollar figure and the income distribution is important.
The median personal income in the US is somewhere between 40K and 45K and median household income is just under 50K USD. That means that half of the people make more and half make less. In 2003 about 1.5% of people made 250K and over. Clearly 250K is NOT middle class. There is a larger percentage of people making less that 2.5K than there is of people making over 250K and clearly those people at the bottom aren't middle class. I'd love to see more recent numbers but the stats are just hard to come by, for some reason. Perhaps because they might cause unrest?
But income is only a part of the story. There is also a concentration of wealth (which can be used to control things without necessarily producing dollars of income). This wealth often builds up over generations which results in dynasties and the equivalent of the old noble classes. The founding fathers found this idea abhorrent and so were in favour of heavy inheritance taxes. They believed that people should prove themselves by their own merit, not by the wealth of their parents.
