Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation's rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies.
Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America's richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket. That top rate had been hovering around 90 percent for the previous two decades. In the 1950s, a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made no move to knock it down.
The Post clan held on to that penthouse for the next 15 years and then decided to "move on." The American people, by that time, had decided to move on as well—from bargain-basement tax rates on high incomes. In 1940, the federal tax rate on income over $200,000 started at 66 percent. By 1944, the top tax rate on all income over $200,000—about $3.4 million in today's dollars—had jumped to 94 percent.
Full article https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022 ... taxed-richBut the political winds were changing. In 1963, President John Kennedy, himself the product of one of America's grandest fortunes, asked Congress to drop the nation's top tax rate down to 65 percent. Congress would mostly oblige, and that top tax rate would sink to 70 percent in 1965. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and his friends on Capitol Hill would shove that rate down even further, first to 50 and then to 28 percent.
I remember an interview of Bob Hope where they asked him about doing the USO shows to the military for free . He said because for every dollar he made the government leaves him with a nickel after taxes.
We can remember Leona Helmsley's quote when thinking about taxing the rich, "Only the little people pay taxes." This quote would also fit TOS and his family.