 So a flat or proportional tax, tax rate remains the same over income levels. So social security, for example, you can kind of think of as a flat type of tax. So in other words, a flat tax, if you were to apply it on an income tax system, would be say, you're gonna tax everyone 10%, or you're gonna tax everyone 15%, and if you earn 100,000, then you tax the same rate, you'll be paying more because you're applying that 10% rate to 100,000 versus someone that earns 10,000, it's gonna be paying a lot less taxes, but you're not actually changing the rate. Now the benefits of a flat tax are that it's gonna be quite simple to calculate. And oftentimes when you're looking at a business or in an economy, simplicity is actually very important because you wanna be able to project how much taxes you're gonna pay because that's gonna be a cost to your household, that's gonna be a cost of doing business. And if it becomes very complex to know what that cost is, that adds what we call uncertainty into the equation both on the household level and on the business level, which makes it difficult to plan and could be a dampening effect, have a dampening effect on economic growth and so on. So in the United States, we have a social security which has a kind of a flat tax system. This isn't the income tax, this is what's called the payroll tax system where we're paying into social security and then we're gonna possibly get a benefit at the retirement age of from social security. So this social security is kind of linked into the income taxes in some ways because if you have the W-2s, they're dealing with social security and so it's reported on the W-2s. But if you have your own business, then you're self-employed. So we'll have to deal with the social security stuff in that instance when we're thinking about income taxes. But in any case, you could see that if the rate was 6.2%, 40,000 times 6.2% is 2,480. If someone earned 100,000 times 6.2%, they would be paying the 6,200. That's basically a flat tax. The benefits of a flat tax is it's easy to make projections to budget, to forecast into the future. So for example, if you're currently earning $40,000 and you think next year you're gonna earn $100,000 and you're trying to say, well, how much tax am I gonna pay then? Well, if the rate is the same, it's a pretty easy calculation to make. Now note that the social security isn't exactly a flat tax. There's some caveats, some deviations from basically a pure flat tax type of system, which is a point we need to make here and with every type of tax we're talking about or every tax law or change that we're gonna be putting in place or talking about because oftentimes, once again, these terms are thrown around as if they're absolute terms. This is a flat tax. This is a progressive tax. But what happens in actuality when a tax is put into place and when changes happen to the law, they start off with something that's quite simple such as a flat or progressive structure and then they make deviations to it, which may make it more or less flat, more or less progressive or have some other complication that usually complicates the system in some way, shape or form. With regards to the social security, it's structured a little bit differently because it's not going into the general fund for the federal government to pay the general needs of the government, usually the military is the primary need for the federal government side of things, but rather it's going into a fund that's gonna be paying out social security benefits. And the idea or concept of social security has kind of changed over time. When it was first put into place, many people thought of it more as a welfare type of program in that it's there to support people who live past their life expectancy and therefore aren't able to save enough money for retirement because in part, people are living longer, for example, but more and more it's being thought of like as a government kind of retirement program because we're putting a whole lot of money into the social security and we're expecting for it to be paid out to everyone that put the money in to the social security. So kind of the idea of the social security, what it's doing, what its role is, I think has changed a bit over time. So, and with regards to social security and the taxation, there's a cap in terms of if you earn more than a certain level of social security, which goes up every year with inflation, we'll talk about more in future presentations, then you don't pay any more tax after that point, which would be odd if it was your primary, like income or your primary funding of the government type of tax. But the reason that kind of makes sense is that the benefits that you're getting in retirement are going to be based on how much money you paid into the system. So if you earn more money, you're paying more money into the system you would expect then if we're thinking about this as a government funded retirement kind of system, you get more money back. But obviously they're trying to taper off so that people that are more well off don't get as much of a benefit. So if your income goes over a certain threshold, you're not gonna get any more benefit when the benefits come out in retirement age. And that's kind of the rationale to say, well, you shouldn't be paying more money in at that point in time. So we'll get into more debates on the social security a little bit more and we'll deal with that when we get into self-employment tax and stuff.