It's not hard to agree that paying taxes is not fun, nor desireable. However, we hope that we are all equally burdened by the taxes that we pay. Well, this is not the case nor has it been for the past 30 years or so since President Reagan changed the tax rate system in the 1980s - essentially decimating any resemblance to a truly marginal tax rate system.

Last December, the Republicans in Congress got President Obama to sign into law the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans, including the wealthiest, who only pay up to 36% of their top income in taxes, anyway. Now the freshman Republicans/Tea-baggers are cutting funding for anything and everything that helps the majority of our society to live, eat, stay healthy, develop, learn and grow - such as money for schools, for non-profit organizations that help and protect women and children who have been abused, for organizations that help low income people to meet their basic needs like food, shelter and health, etc. At the same time, these very same politicians enjoy government-sponsored healthcare, the ability to raise their own salaries, the ability to decide to engage our military into more conflicts which will inevitably cost us billions more in revenue/debt, not to mention the cost of human lives!, etc. Clearly, there's a blindspot in our government which represents the majority of the country who do NOT earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income - instead, our government, as a whole, has decided to only represent the needs and desires of the wealthy. The method that the government uses to fund the wealthy is to cut their taxes (as well as taxes on corporations which the wealthy control), and in order to keep their taxes low, the government has to cut funding of the many different institutions and organizations in which they sponsor - such as the National Institutes of Health and public school systems. [Of course, these same politicians do not want to cut funding for our military because killing people in other countries is more important to them than saving the lives of people in America.]

When you make millions of dollars, paying a few percentage points more in taxes doesn't make you poor or even really affect how you live, but this is not the case for the majority of us who make less than $250,000 a year. We all can agree that there are some necessities that the government must pay for and therefore, taxes are needed to fund these endeavors. We may disagree on what they are, but we know there are such government-sponsored basics such as education, defense, etc. We all contribute to fund these activities - but the rich do not bear the same burden as the rest of us do! In fact, the less the rich have to pay in taxes, the more the rest of us do to make up for it. Why should the working classes carry more of the tax burden than the rich? Why should we fund their wealth?

If you are tired of funding the rich and want to reform our current tax rate system, please sign this petition!