I see this become apparent on social media every so often and it's really just depressing how widespread the misunderstanding is.
51% of Americans who were polled in a 2021 survey agreed with the statement that "You pay your marginal tax rate on all of your income".
The simplest way to pare down the tax code would be to take your percentile of income, and you pay half that % of your income in taxes. Poorest 10%? Income tax is 5%. Richest 1%? Income tax is 49.5%.
That's way too low on the upper end.
Any income over like 2 million dollars a year should be taxed at 100%.
And on the off chance some lib comes in here and says that's why rich people have other streams of income just count all those other streams were all aware of but aren't taxed for no reason.
I didn't say best, I said simplest. Another way would be to make your take-home pay a weighted logarithmic decay curve. That would also be continuous and smooth, but it would involve high-school math that most Americans are utterly incapable of.