The wealthy do not want the flat tax; they are the people responsible for defeating that concept everytime it comes up in the debate. They control the congressmen and that is who votes on the budget. The reason for a progressive tax is the simple fact that by definition the wealthier people consume more of the resources of the state and therefor should pay more. This is all old hat and has been discussed to death on thousands of websites. I have finally gotten my Adobe reader up to working. The IRS files were so big I needed to upgrade to the next level of Adobe to access them. It is finally working right.