-What do you define as a "progressive system of taxation"?
Regressive, flat and progressive tax structures are all based on the same calculation, amount paid in taxes divided by income (the effective tax rate). Typically this will be done by income bracket (quartiles or quintiles, etc.). So you take the entire amount of tax paid by a quintile (lets say the bottom 20% of earners) and divide that by the sum of that brackets income. If the lower income brackets show the lowest effective tax rate and the upper brackets show the highest effective tax rate, that is a progressive tax structure. If each bracket has the same effective tax rate, that is a flat tax structure, and if the lowest income brackets have higher effective tax rates than the upper tax brackets, that is a regressive tax structure.
-What do you mean by "There are regressive taxes but on balance it is progressive."?
The link I provided:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/are-federal-taxes-progressive
shows that at the total tax level, taxes are progressive in nature because the effective tax rate goes up as you move up income brackets. However, when you look at the component taxes that make up the total, some of them are regressive, see excise taxes.
Corporate taxes strike me as being a little regressive, but the complexity is enough for me to say I could be wrong. A simple example, Let's say you make $1M per year and I make $10K per year. We both go to McDonalds and order a happy meal. After the expense of the food and the box are deducted, the expense of the labor, the expense of all the other overhead, there is probably some small profit on each of the happy meals, and it is the same amount for each happy meal. Some amount of this profit will go to the government in the form of corporate income tax, and it will be the same amount on each of our happy meals. So if you take that amount of tax and divide it by our incomes, I will be paying a higher effective tax rate because my income is smaller than yours, basic math. So this example is regressive in nature.
I see corporations as net positives and here is an example. Let's say you gave me all the raw mateirals needed for me to create an iPhone, glass, metal, plastic, etc. How much do you think it would cost me to convert those raw materials into an iPhone? Given the amount of specialized processing required and the machinery needed to do that, it could be a very expensive thing to make as a one off, surely far more than $1000. So the economies of scale present in large corporations allows us to purchase things we could never afford to make for ourselves. This is a HUGE benefit to society that I think overshadows the down side that you are concerned with. I will not try to convince you that you are wrong, just that you and I will likely look at the same thing and see it differently.
I'm in favor of a progressive tax code as it is vital to maximizing revenue, which I think is the number one goal when you are running a deficit. I like the Trump tax cuts on a purely selfish level, because I like paying less. However, as a matter of public policy I could only support these tax cuts if the federal government was also cut down to a level that matched expected revenue. I do not believe that a government can run large deficits in perpetuity, eventually it will fail as history has demonstrated. That which cannot go on forever, will not. Governments that go above 100% of GDP in debt are historically in a dangerous territory. The only time the US has previously been here is from WWII where we had the primary undestroyed manufacturing left in the world to pull ourselves back from a dangerous debt level. I don't know how we do it this time around.
I see zero difference between the two elected parties currently serving. Repubs TALK about fiscal responsibility, but do not govern that way.