For example, if you make 300k your taxes are going up only 11%. IF you make 80k, your taxes are going up 16.5%. Just doesn't feel right.
I don't comprehend your information or intuition on where money is in the economy and how it works. No one with billions is sitting on a big mattress of it. The money is in the economy working in a fairly efficient fashion. That money is capital for business enterprises, personal loans, etc.
That money has "momentum" within the economy and value because of the people who are controlling it who have a vested self interest in using it as wisely as possible to keep their companies running.
When you take away chunks from these people, you aren't siphoning it out of the swimming pools of the rich. You're destroying the momentum of that money and the value it provides to people working in corporations, in factories, on roads, in restaurants, on and on.
Taking away money from the rich to help the economic welfare of society is like taking your best football players off the field and sitting them on the bench for the benefit of your football team.
By that logic, tax brackets should be regressive so that the "best" players pay 0% or, better yet, negative.
I don't comprehend your "intuition" on granparent's post about cash. You imply all of it is being invested, which is absolutely not true.
If the United States wants to have a European level of both social services and spending (a legitimate choice, although not one I'd make), the wealthy can't possibly carry the tax burden alone - it needs to be spread around more equitably, over all tax brackets.
If having a national defense and an infrastructure that has enabled a person to build that kind of income, don't you think that person should be paying more than a 1/(population of the United States) share of the taxes?
Wat.
Top 10% — $87,334
I don't understand this argument. The infrastructure benefits everyone. The opportunity to succeed from that infrastructure is available to everyone. The road that leads to the grocery store benefits the grocer and the countless consumers who use it. Who gets the better side of the bargain and how do you determine the magnitude of that inequality?
If anything, public infrastructure tends to help the little guy. Historically, when public services weren't provided, the rich paid for their own needed infrastructure, protective services, etc. Those services were geared exclusively to help the wealthy land owners. If you got protection from the watch patrolling the nearby keep, you were lucky because they weren't really there for you.
If you look at total taxes, instead of just federal income taxes like the Heritage Foundation likes to do (intellectually bankrupt think tank whores that they are), you'll see that the total US tax burden is pretty flat from median up to the top 1%: http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2012/04/who_pays_taxes_in_america....
But don't worry. As others have pointed out, it's extremely unlikely that all of GWB's tax cuts will be rolled back.
The marginal tax rate cuts were signed by Obama in 2010 and the "cliff" includes things like the Payroll Tax Holiday-- the largest of tax cuts [1]-- which only came about in 2010.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-deutsche-ban...