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"The richer should pay more"

I'll paraphrase Walter Williams. 'If I want to get some work done on my computer I could hire you for say $200 to do it. However, if you want to clear $200 and you are in a 30% tax bracket you will only take home $140 dollars. For that sum you are unwilling to do the work. For me to hire you anyway I would have to pay you $285 so you could net $200. I am unwilling to pay that sum. So no transaction takes place and NO taxes are collected period.'

Taxes either stymie economic activity or alter behavior in order to avoid them or both. Lower taxes reward wealth creation (jobs). Higher taxes reward politicians with the votes of the beneficiaries of government hand-outs. And those beneficiaries are no longer exclusively the poor. They are the legions of big government at all levels whose jobs depend on taxes.

You have made some empirical assumptions about the marginal utility of income and leisure. And the case for supply side turns on such empirical assumptions. It is strictly a data thingie. The supply siders in the present bracket ranges simply don't have such data to back up their case. They are running on empty. When the top marginal federal income tax rates were 70% or 93% (as they were once), they probably were not.

Walter Williams. He is the guy that said on Fox News last week that EVERYONE on unemployment used it as an excuse not to work. Not some, not most, he said EVERYONE... He does have a rather radical view on things like this.