Reality shows its liberal bias again.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I doubt Lee or Issa particularly care about anything that doesn't serve their corporate donors, but taxes for those in the lowest brackets are about the same as they were in the 1980s. Many poor and working class folk like myself legitimately struggle to meet our tax burden.

Incorrect. The marginal rates may be similar, but there are so many more credits today. Working class people generally receive money through the earned income tax credt, child tax credit, etc. Of course, they do pay a lot in highly regressive payroll taxes, but even those have been slashed as of late.

I'm not sure what your socioeconomic class is, but my last job was changing tires day in and day out. Trust me when I say that the view on the ground is that the tax burden is crushing, no matter how many loopholes almost none of us actually exploit.

Imagine the crushing burden if poor and middle class people actually had to pay the full price of driving on the roads that the government builds.  There'd be a lot less drivers out there... and certainly fewer tires to be changed.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The point isn't to try and collect a greater amount of taxes as a part of GDP.  It is to try and set the tax rate at a level that will best create economic growth for the middle class.

A 70% top tax rate might not increase revenue as a percentage of GDP... but it might, by reducing the tax burden on the poor and middle class and raising it on the rich, spur GDP growth so that revenues greatly increase while reliance on government services shrinks thanks to a prosperous middle class that can afford things for themselves.