Opinion/Once Upon a Time the US Taxed the Rich

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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.
But 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.
Full article https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022 ... taxed-rich

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.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Opinion/Once Upon a Time the US Taxed the Rich

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In the 50's and early 60's my dad supported our family of four kids and two parents on one salary. The GI Bill allowed him to buy our house, and we enjoyed tri-weekly duck and cover drills in our good schools which we believed would save us from Ruskie nukes. While belief in the magic duck and cover was clearly misguided, the money, the schools, and the house were real. This was California where all drinking fountains were for all drinkers. Of water. My dad preferred beer, which I thankfully inherited from him.

Tax or eat the rich, one.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Opinion/Once Upon a Time the US Taxed the Rich

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The cut from 94% to 70% was ONLY for income above a certain level, but the rich made it sound that they were taxed that way from the very 1st dollar they made, which was a lie. The JFK/LBJ tax cut was the ONLY one that saw the Laffer Curve model INCREASE government revenue. Every other other decreased it, but ReThugs didn't care because it gave them cover to cut taxes on their richest donors who responded by giving them MORE money to cut their taxes further.

See, the Laffer Curve is based on the hypothesis that if at a zero tax rate, there'll be no government tax revenue, and at 100% tax rate, nobody will bother generating a cent of taxable income so there won't be any revenue, either. So there's a curve where as taxes increase from zero, revenue increases, but, it MUST bend back on itself to get to zero at 100%

But where does it bend back? All we know is it was somewhere below 94%. It could be above or below 70%--we don't have the data. But we do know that every tax cut starting with Reagan, revenue went down. But the ReThugs just don't care--it's an excuse.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

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