<p>You may be right, Jman, but unfortunately it's exceedingly difficult to determine who should pay and who shouldn't. If you think about it, it opens up another can of worms. After all, you can't determine the degree to which a rich person deserves his or her wealth without a very extensive analysis; who's going to pay the government bureaucrats who spend the whole working day performing these analyses? Is it fair to have Jane, John and family, living on $30,000/yr and struggling to put two kids through college, pay taxes to determine whether someone making several orders of magnitude more per year should pay taxes to help other people who earn nothing at all? (That last sentence employed several stereotypes, but I think you get the idea.)</p>
<p>No system is perfect, and no matter how hard we try, the system will be unfair to somebody. The least we can do is - forgive the mathematical analogy - attempt to minimize the integral of unfairness over all of society. This means taking reasonable measures to ensure that each person has a decent meal and a roof over his or her head.</p>