The whole point of my post is that progressive taxation is a question of which individuals pay what, not whether money stays with individuals or goes to the government. You appear to be caught up in the framing of political rhetoric.
As if 'framing' isn't an important part of communicating ideas? In this case you chose to frame the discussion in the form of the government 'giving' its money to the people. I'm rejecting that formulation. That doesn't mean I'm rejecting the idea of taxes or more specifically progressive taxes.
I offered a thought experiment, and using the example of "giving $1,000" is easier to think about than "not taking $1,000". As a thought experiment they are equivalent, with respect to the question: who utilizes resources most efficiently?
By introducing variability of how much the government takes total it adds another question that is being used to persistently distract from the question of progressivity. When people say "the wealthy should bear a larger portion of the burden" a typical response is "we should be spending less on government!" – which is no response at all, just a distraction.
You said: "The notion that taxation should be predicated on whether the government or the person can 'better use' the person's money is damn scary." – which is EXACTLY what I was pointedly NOT asking. The degree of progressivity in a system does not determine whether a person or the government has the person's money, but WHICH people have how much money.
OK, I'll accept that you weren't intending to suggest that the government has primary claim on your income but you seem unaware of how your framing has been used by others to actually make that claim.
I can accept theoretically that you can separate the progressive structure of the federal income tax from spending decisions but in reality it is pretty hard to solve our budget problems by simply taxing the 'rich'--at least if you use the $250,000 figure that is most commonly used.
Now we're demanding that progressivity must balance the budget too? This is car salesman accounting, muddling unrelated choices together to distract from individual choices that can be rationally considered.
You keep giving these pundit talking points – the talking points of pundits have been rehashed enough, we shouldn't be using them here, it's not a productive form of discussion. Are we men or are we pundits? I, sir, am a man! ;)
Huh? I'm not at all suggesting that the budget deficit can/should be solved by tweaking the progressivity of the federal tax system. In fact I'm saying the opposite--it is very hard to solve the budget deficit in that way because what we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
