Flat tax rate is not progressive, but it's better than what we have now.
Progressive taxation is commonly understood to mean that the ratio changes according to your income or wealth. A simple example would be 5% if you make less than $25k/yr, 15% if you make between $25k and $100k a year, and 30% if you make more than $100k annually. A better example would be a sliding scale, some continuous function where an inverse proportion or some asymptote function is used.
I don't understand how people can miss that point. Taxes are measured in percent, not in dollars. Percents. A proportion of the money measured is taken away. Taxes are not $100 for this person and $100,000 for someone else. They're defined in the IRS code as percents. People only measure taxes in dollar amounts to cover something up.
Our current income taxes are nominally progressive, using the bracket system in my simple example. But once you total up all of the categorizations and loopholes, they're still progressive -- but in the opposite direction from what's written into the brackets. The IRS wrote a simple table which says "Poor people pay less taxes." Then they wrote a few hundred thousand pages which allow rich people to pay less.
Remember, every time I say describe an amount of tax, I mean as a percentage of their income. There is no other valid way to measure tax IMNSHO.
If you're going to make a flat tax, that'd be a step in the right direction toward equalizing the tax burden (percentage wise).
