Voluntary Taxation

It's a popular meme of the right that if you want to pay higher taxes, you should.  The treasury actually has a department set up to handle this.  It's called "Gifts to the United States" and for the last several years it's been taking in about $3M a year.  Not only is this a pretty feckless way to solve our $15 Trillion debt problem, it conveys a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of elementary economics.

Economics is about entities competing with each other in the market.  If you have an advantage--lower costs, better marketing, better product, etc.--you will likely win.  Everything else follows from that.  Price adjusts to match supply with demand because of this relationship.    The problem with voluntary tax rates is that the payer of higher rates is giving themselves a disadvantage.  Republicans get this part.  What they don't get is that as long as everybody is paying the same rates, nobody has a disadvantage.   Nobody who is actually competing in the market can afford to pay a higher rate than their competitor.  It must be fair, or the market is not free.

For this same reason, higher taxes do not hurt the economy, or the individual, as long as they are the same for everybody.   If there's less money in the economy, the cost of individual goods and services automatically deflate to match.  That's supply and demand.   It's only when they're not fair that people lose out due to taxation.

It's impossible to have perfectly equitable rates.  My costs are likely slightly different than yours, because of where we live and who we know.  But as long as we get as close as is practical, it's fair.  It's even fair if we add a moderate penalty to those who have been successful.  As long as the penalty is not so large as to make it worthwhile to intentionally become less successful, the free market still works.  This is called "progressive taxation", incidentally.