Let's make it simple and look at federal and state income tax, ignore social security and any other small deductions that are actually benefits... So looking at money they're not ever going to see again. Someone who has no special training and gets a basic $25k job will use the $12,950 standard deduction to bring their taxable income down to $12,050. $10,275 of that will have 10% federal tax ($1027.50) and the remaining $1,875 is at 12% ($225). So someone making $25k is paying $1,252.50 of federal tax. So their taxable state income of the roughly 5% is based on about $10,750 ($537). So someone making $25k pays a total of $1789.50 of income tax, 7.1% of their income goes away as income tax.
Now let's look at someone who spent years studying/training to do something technical and even more time gaining experience to get to where they make $100k. They use the standard deduction to bring it down to $87,050 of taxable income. The first $10,275 is still at the 10% fed rate ($1027.50). There is $76,775 remaining. Then the next $31,499 is taxed at 12% ($3779.88). There is $45,276 remaining. All of this is at the massive tax jump of 22% ($9,960.72). So this is $14,768.10 federal tax. $72281.90 is taxable at state level, so another $3614 is paid to state tax, bringing the total income tax paid to $18382 tax paid. So they're paying 18.382% of their income to income taxes.
One person didn't do anything to get a good job, pays $1,789.50 in income taxes during the year, the other person worked hard to get to a point where they have to pay $18,382 of income taxes. And yet they both have an equal political vote on how that tax money is spent.
