> The aggregate data would be public and the underlying data points would not be.

So now leaves the question, what does this report look like?

> Just in the same way it's possible to have a robust discussion of income equality but I can't look up how much money my neighbor earns.

Who's having these discussions? Certainly not the entirety of the political landscape is involved. This is a leftist idea, so perhaps the people on the left are having a robust discussion about wages, but the people on the right and some of the moderates (like myself) are tired of people saying they don't make enough (being self made from a poor family myself). Your idea here is yet another extension of this. You want to know what people make and own so you can determine how much tax they should pay, and if they're paying enough. I can short circuit this for you. We all know the left wants more taxes, the right wants less, and the majority of the moderates are siding with the right right now. We can safely avoid this massive headache and know the outcome desired by all parties involved.

> No, this is not true. Income tax brackets are updated every year, and always have been, to account for inflation.

OK you missed this one completely so I'll walk you through it a bit more. The value represented by the currency never changes. However the representation of that value does change over time and with an inflationary currency it keeps increasing. So the reason the the tax brackets and taxes are increased or updated, is because they need more money to get the same value from taxes as the previous year. With the left wanting to implement full on socialism, this will never end and we will go broke as a nation. Or put more simply, when 100% tax is implemented, and we need more, what happens then?

> The 19th-century income tax only lasted a few years, was not particularly progressive, raised very little revenue, and generally bears little to no resemblance to our current income tax. The income tax we have today dates to the early 20th century.

OK?

> But we should care about other countries because their experiences can inform ours.

No.

> If you want to construct a modern state, you need progressive taxation to raise the 40-70% of national income a year in tax revenue (all "developed" modern states do this. Places like India and South Africa don't, which explains a lot...). If you believe we should go back to a 19th-century state which collects low taxes and does little redistribution, (1) inequality would balloon; and (2) I've got bad news for you, because most people in the United States support significantly more progressive taxation. (Not to mention that the United States would quickly fall behind the rest of the world due to lack of investment in education, which is one of the primary drivers of productivity growth.)

So how did the US become the greatest nation prior to high taxation? How come high taxes was literally the trigger that started the rebellion? Some people have an idea that the only way to a prosperous nation is via socialism, and to those people I'd say they're brainwashed as the schools in the US have been doing for about 4 decades now.

My point remains, if we continue on this path, and seek to justify further taxes we will ultimately end up with 100% income tax. And that's really the point of all of this, to implement socialism.