In my experience, most educated proponents of progressive taxation believe in something like "the marginal utility per dollar for poor people is higher than tha

In my experience, most educated proponents of progressive taxation believe in something like "the marginal utility per dollar for poor people is higher than that of rich people, and the government should attempt to tax toward some concept of equi-utility," though I'm certainly open to hearing that that's not what most believe. In other words, taxing $1 from a poor person takes food out of their mouth while taxing $1 from a rich person delays the purchase of a new yacht by 1 second, so we should take that money from the person who'll lose less utility by its taking. We also don't realistically attempt to tax people according to some abstract conception of who has benefited the most from government infrastructure.