Numbers, not rights. Here's the questions that should be asked, studied, and answered before any question of what taxes should look like are answered by policy. What effect does high taxes have on the economy when those taxes are placed onto the wealthy? What benefits does the money earned from high taxes bring to the economy? What harms come from taxing the poor? What benefits come from taxing the poor? Find the optimal point of tax. Heck, do that for every person in the world, and tax each person until the wealth taken from them stops causing more total economic benefit than the harm caused by taking the money from them. It's not about rights, it's not about "deserve" or "earned" or any of that other bullshit. It's about picking the best policy as a nation, which is what lawmakers should be doing, not quibbling and fighting over if we have the right to tax people or not, or if the wealth people make "comes from society or their own hand". Rights are regressive ideals that state that there is some big special trait to being human. They are only useful when you are a bunch of people aren't able to properly ask and research the question of "What action is best to take here". Rights are a shotgun-type approach to make sure most people act in a generally good way without needing to think through the process, and that system should be falling to the side when we have the information gathering and organizing power we do today. Rights are like religion, they were a useful ideology a few decades ago, and they are a relic of the past that is doing more to hold society back than it is to drive it forward. Not to say that rights are totally pointless, in times where snap judgments are needed then things like rights should come into play again, but this is not one of those cases. Secondly, often the numbers/philosophy behind the collection of those numbers are wrong, and people will tend to recognize when this is true and react against the numbers on an emotional basis of rights/morality/etc. This is also fine, and often legitimate (machine learning systems being used to justify discrimination is going to be an interesting topic on this matter). However, this isn't one of those cases either. Study, get many groups to collect numbers that should be accurate, and compare and force these groups to find collection methods that generally are unbiased and fair. Use those numbers to find an accurate graph of income-tax per city based on things like cost of life and other things. Expensive? Yes. But we are taking about a practice that the function of our entire government stems from, we can justify the cost.