A flat tax rate in terms of percentage of income would [i]theoretically[/i] be the fairest option. Unfortunately, theory and reality are often different. In reality, a progressive tax is more "fair" because corporations and high net worth individuals often cannot act honestly - they use loopholes available in the system to avoid being taxed on money that they "hide". The simplest example of this is corporations hiding income in offshore accounts to avoid taxation on that income. People like to chop it down to "hatred" or "jealousy" for wealthy people. That's not the case. Wealthy people try their hardest to avoid taxes and often end up not paying their fair share of taxes. That aside, taxing the poor more is obviously not going to do anything but make their lives harder. However, taxing the wealthy at higher rates does have some arguments. One argument is that nobody actually [i]needs[/i] millions or billions of dollars that they just sit on without investing back into the economy, and therefore taxing at higher rates is beneficial to society as a whole. A lot of people don't like this idea and see it as "stealing" from people who "work harder" (often not the case, but that is a separate topic). To take everything into perspective, take this fact and think about: 62 people in the world hold more wealth altogether than the poorest 3,600,000,000 people. People will argue that they earned their wealth, though that is often not the case. The Walton family for instance did nothing but inherit, as one example.