I’m looking for serious answers to understand the mentality. Please avoid the snark. I know it’s low hanging and tempting but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of use here on Lemmy “get it”.

I just can’t get out of my head how absurd it is that we, in the U.S. anyway, put so much of the tax burden on working class folks instead of those most benefiting from our economic system.

It seems to me the standard deduction should be at least the median personal income (~$40k) if not the mean(~$60k) with progressive tax brackets adjusted to cover costs thereafter and possibly a supplemental wealth tax.

But I’m not an economist so trying to understand why I’m wildly wrong and this would be a terrible idea either from an economic perspective or from a political perspective.