HN requests that we avoid tone policing, but your insults are not appreciated nor necessary.

It seems that we have flown by each other with insufficiently precise terminology.

I agree that progressive taxation means that you receieve a lower after-tax hourly rate on income that puts you into higher tax brackets.

However, you continue to receive a higher after-tax income than the person who, for any reason, declined or did not perform that additional work (because the higher rate never reduces your effectively hourly rate for the last hourto zero)

Which is reflective of the precise point of progressive taxation. The dollars you earn that put you into each successively higher tax bracket would (if the brackets are designed correctly) be of less and less marginal utility to you, and thus the impact of you losing more of them to taxation is similarly reduced.

With the current tax brackets for the USA, you could annotate them as follows:

    0 - 13850 : critical income, no taxation

13850 - 24850 : 13850 wasn't even livable, so you pay only 10% on any extra

24850 - 58575 : 24850 was vaguely livable, so you pay 12% on the extra

58575 - 109225: 58575 was getting comfortable, so you pay 22% on the extra

109225 - 195950: you're now firmly into comfortable life, so you pay 24% on the extra

and so on, up to:

$591975: you've already more than 0.5M in income, any more is of near zero marginal utility so we tax the extra at (shock! horror!) 37%

The alternative - a flat rate - means that every extra dollar of income (over some standard deduction) is taxed at the same rate regardless of its marginal utility. By definition, this means that people with lower incomes "feel" the tax burden much more than people with higher incomes. The "last" $1000 they earn is of significant marginal utility to them, but is taxed at the same rate as someone for whom their last $1000 is of near-zero marginal utility.

That isn't a fair way to share tax burdens.