Since you assumed I was arguing in bad faith here, I assume that you are too, and that you are someone who is property rich but not very productive (eg a landlord of some kind, or a Californian benefiting from prop 13), and you are interested in keeping your privileged tax status.

Personally, I am in the top 10% of income earners, but not the top 1%, and I get most of my income from LTCG (this is how the tax code incentivizes you to structure your income, and I follow incentives).

All of your arguments here and the resulting evidence assume that "fairness" in a tax system is about charging people with high incomes more. Specifically, that progressive taxation - which has nothing to do with political progressiveness or social progress, and is just about the tax progressing as your income goes up - is the fair way to tax people. It is not. Pulling out these sources as arguments in favor of progressive taxation is begging the question.

Income and wealth are correlated, but they are not the same. Income and the societal costs of your existence are also not correlated. All of these "tax fairness" pictures and websites use a sleight of hand to deflect the attention from the wealthy: they use "1%" to refer to the top 1% of income earners, not the people who you would think are actually in "the 1%" as occupy wall street would have identified.

The people who take the brunt of the burden of today's progressive tax system are middle class doctors, lawyers, and software engineers. These are not people who take up a lot of resources or place a significant drain on society - they tend to spend their time working rather than joyriding in yachts and private jets or lobbying for subsidies for their businesses. These are people who create a lot of value for the rest of the economy, and it is silly to use "progressive" taxation to punish this value creation.

Progressive taxes, in my opinion, are not fair. They are the wealthy pulling up the ladder and making it harder to compete with them. They are taxing people who benefit society a lot in order to subsidize people who have accrued a lot of resources in the past.

Wealth in assets tends to move from things that aren't real estate to real estate. Companies tend to go bust after 100 years or so, even investing in every company on the market exposes you to fairly high beta, things like gold don't appreciate much, government bonds don't have an appropriate term or appropriate returns for 100 year time horizons, etc. If you want to preserve a fortune, or if you are investing for longer than a 50 year time horizon, you do it in real estate.

Therefore, the loss of property due to taxation is not a bug: it's a feature. If you are property rich, you should have a long-term incentive in making sure that your community does well, and you benefit a lot from the systems that maintain your property rights. You should be happy to pay higher property taxes because of that. Ultimately, your property rights are about excluding other people from using that property, and the government guarantees that right using the courts and using guns. If you want to stay property rich, you should have to do something that benefits society.

In comparison, a fair tax system, in my opinion, should be about the drain of resources that you place on society (this does not include things like welfare payments, which are not societal drains, but transfers of wealth). This means:

* Vehicle and gas taxes based on how much you drive, as well as taxes on railroads, flights, etc.

* Physical property taxes

* Luxury goods consumption taxes - a VAT or a sales tax works

* Carbon and pollution taxes

* Sin taxes

* High fines for criminal acts - preferably income-based or wealth-based fines

* License fees for resource extraction

* Fees and taxes for intellectual property maintenance

* A flat income tax that applies to all forms of income over a certain amount

Align the taxes with the costs that society bears for your existence. That should also have the benefit of further disincentivizing antisocial behavior. Tax people for the value they drain from the society, not for the value they add. *That* is fair.