What people continually fail to understand is the disparity between the guy in the top '10%', the guy in the top '1%' and the guy in the top 400.
Top 25% $67,280.00
Top 10% $113,799.00
Top 5% $159,619.00
Top 1% $380,354.00
Top 0.1% $6,000,000.00
Top 400 $8,815,945.00
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxst...=98123,00.html
The guy in the 'top25%' has nothing in common with the guy in the 'top 1%' and the guy in the top 1% has nothing in common with the guy in the 'top 400'. The numbers are so heavily skewed that making 'brackets' out of them is pointless.
The rules I have seen mentioned boil down to 'if you earned more than X you can not pay less than Y% as your income tax rate. No deduction, loophole or other financial maneuver would allow you to pay less than a set baseline percentage. A change like that would require someone like Warren Buffet to pay the 30+% his bracket requires even if most of his income is subject to personal gains rates instead. It would have zero impact on anyone who is already paying the rate their 'bracket' requires.
In reality, all of this is a minor reshuffling of a broken deck. There are only two possible eventual outcomes. We are either going to a flat tax rate with zero adjustments and loopholes regardless of amount earned and a one time credit for a 'poverty limit' OR we are going to a National Sales Tax that taxes us all on what we spend rather than what we earn. It won't happen with the current political climate, but it will happen during our lifetimes.
