“at no time did the rules themselves change due to my actions”
No, the same way the rule against murderer doesn’t change whether you murderer someone or not. But its application to you changes. At one income level one rule applies, at another, another.
“At no time were the rules any different for me than they were for you”
Again, they stayed the same, but if we were in different brackets different ones applied; you paid one rate and I another.
“If you had made the same decisions as I did, we would have paid the same amount”
Yes, but maybe I didn’t and we paid different amounts. How can you say the same rules applied?
Where I live, there is no tax on food, but there is on beer. If we go to the same store and you buy food and I buy beer, I will pay tax and you will not. We made different decisions which effected our level of taxation. But we did so with the rules being applied to us equally, even though the effect was different on each of us.
Two teams playing football, under normal circumstances, play under the same rules, even though the one that scores a touchdown is awarded more points than the one that kicks a field goal. The outcomes are different, but the same rules apply to both. If one team was awarded more points for a touchdown than the other, that would be playing by different rules.