Enter the whole concept of a percentage. 10% hurts all of us the exact same amount of hurt no matter what you make.
That's not really true. The poorer you are, the larger the percentage of your income goes to survival needs so the more paying any amount in taxes would hurt. I don't like the flat tax unless the exempted minimum is at least $30,000 for single or a couple and $40,000 with children. People living on SS are not on the dole. The government took money from them at gunpoint for their entire working lives with the promise of giving it back at retirement with interest. If you know anything about how actuaries calculate risk, you would know that SS is not a bargain since the "system" pays out as little as it possibly can and anyone who breaks even based on the
current value of money has won the SS lottery.
The biggest problem with our tax code is not the rates, it is the exemptions. If you remove ALL exemptions for individuals except the one above, then a graduated scale that goes from 1% to 10% at ~ $200,000 will probably bring in more revenue. We could retain some deductions such as cost of goods, wages, and R&D for businesses. BUT, and this is huge, there is a large ecosystem that revolves around taxation that would be destroyed by removing the deductions so this is never going to happen. The tax code will continue to be byzantine and require the help of an accountant for anything more than the most basic of returns. Anyway, what would we do with those new 87,000 IRS agents with guns? They wouldn't have anyone to audit but they'd still have the guns.
But, I agree, if you don't pay taxes, you should not get to vote on how my taxes are spent.