You can't do that with $250,000 today.

So your basic argument is that it's tough to get by on $250k these days, so your solution is to shift the tax burden via your flat tax to people making less than $250k. Nice.

As for the moderately well-off vs. Buffett thing: Following your logic, the best thing would be a more progressive tax rate, right? If $250k is a struggle, shouldn't the burden be pushed up? Of course not, you argue, that's not "fair". You think (somewhat arbitrarily) that only a flat tax rate is fair. I'd go a step farther- what would really be "fair" would be a fixed tax per head- we're all created equal, right? Same rights, etc., shouldn't we all bear the load equally? What's wrong with that argument?

For your reference, I make a bit under $200k. I live in a 4k ft2 4BR house in a town with low crime and excellent public schools. I intend to pay for college for my 4 children at full retail (though that now depends on us getting out of the ditch in the next few years, so the 529's can bounce back). Between Fed, State, Town, and FICA, I paid somewhere around $50k in taxes last year. If my taxes go up a bit more, I'd get by, and on the whole still think I was getting a pretty fair deal- my life is good. The loss of income I'd see are far less problematic for me, and far less problematic for the economy, than if that loss of income came from lower income brackets.

Clearly we view the world through two different lenses. You think in terms of direct causation. So, for example, you fail to appreciate that you benefited from, e.g., not catching something like cholera and dying when you were a baby, a result of government-run public health systems (a little sanitation goes a long way). The government never gave you a dime, it just did stuff like greatly reducing the probability of your premature death.

You view your success as a product of your moral superiority and discipline- the classic Lakoff description of conservative thought- you have made that quite plain. You think you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, and those who make less money than you do so because they are less disciplined and ambitious and watch too much BluRay. Therefore, you are under no obligation to help them out, except what you do voluntarily as a (morally superior benefactor).

I think that this morality tale is a lovely fable that, like most libertarian thought, sounds nice on first principles but fails empirically. I think that progressive tax structures, though they fail simplistic tests of "fairness", have shown themselves empirically to be good for all members of our society. Great disparities in wealth create external costs. Conservatives and/or libertarians don't like to acknowledge external costs, because free markets aren't optimal if there are any. It's a big problem for them; their Microeconomics Chapter 1, Page 1 view of the world falls apart if a system has external costs.

I don't know what the optimal tax structure for the US is, and I'll be the first to agree that large parts of the current structure are screwy, and that filing an even moderately-complicated return is a huge timesink. But I do know that a flat tax approach is unlikely to benefit our nation- though "fair", it would encourage a continued concentration of wealth; cue Teddy Roosevelt.

Anyway, Obama got elected and is proving to be a pretty shrewd politician, so I reckon your taxes are going to go up, so we'll get a chance to see who's right.

Cheers.