If you want to collect fish you go to where the fish are at, if you want to collect customers you go to where the customers are at, and if you want to collect money for taxes you go to where the money is at. Basic logic tells us that in a world in which each household makes about the same income and has about the same wealth as every other household, a fair tax assessment, would be about equal for each household; and in a world in which some households have appreciably more money than a significant amount of the population, of which a fair amount of that population pretty much struggles each day to make ends meet, the appropriate party to tax has got to be those that have that wealth.
America has a progressive income tax for the expressed purpose that those that have more to thereby pay more; so that, taxes collected from the wealthy, will be utilized by the government to support and to assist Americans that have little or nothing, along with setting up institutions that will allow all citizens to have not only a seat at the table but a true opportunity to experience the best of the American dream.
It then follows that as reported in book "The Betrayal of The American Dream", the tax code in 1955 appeared to be working in its effectiveness, as "...the four hundred households with the highest incomes--paid 51.2 percent of their income in federal taxes," but rather than this type of taxation percentage of the superrich continuing in the decades since, in fact, the tax rates of the four hundred households with the highest incomes, have seen their federal tax rate, plummeted, to ridiculously low levels. So that, as reported at cbpp.org, the four hundred household with the highest incomes "…paid 16.6 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2007." Further to the point, as reported by
indexmundi.com each country in the world has been assigned a Gini coefficient for income inequality, of which, most people see a country such as Russia, as the cardinal definition of a plutocracy, but incredibly the Gini coefficient of income inequality in Russia is at 37.70, whereas America is actually higher at 41.00, indicating that America has more income inequality than Russia, which fundamentally indicates that America is a country of the superrich, by the superrich, and for the superrich.
Not too surprisingly, money is a form of power, so that those that have money, especially lots and lots of money, will find that augmented by not being taxed at an appropriate rate for their wealth, which allows the richer to not only get richer and hence more powerful; thereby also means that democracy itself, inevitably becomes undercut by the money that the superrich and their connections are able to utilize to benefit themselves to the exclusion of the vast majority of Americans.
When it comes to the richest households, the biggest benefit to those that have money is the fact that as reported by cbpp.org, "In 2007, the top 400 filers derived 66 percent of their income from capital gains and dividends," and with the qualified capital gains tax rate being lowered to a maximum of 15% from the years 2004-2012, and with 2018 the maximum being now capped at 20%, it can be stated for an absolute certainty, that the four hundred households with the highest incomes are not going to be taxed appreciably more than they paid in 2007 when they paid taxes at the anemic rate of just 16.6 percent, which is worlds below the 1955 tax rate collected from those households of 51.2 percent.
The bottom line is that the four hundred households with the highest incomes primarily make their money from capital gains and dividends, which essentially means making their money without laboring a whit for it, yet, this government doesn't do a thing to change it, signifying that the truth of the matter is, this government, for all intents and purposes, marches to the beat of the superrich and no one else.