On Taxing the Rich, a Top Pol Breaks Ranks

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



On Taxing the Rich, a Top Pol Breaks Ranks
March 3, 2012

A tax-the-rich bombshell has dropped in the presidential race. The French presidential race. But this bombshell’s blast will almost certainly reverberate elsewhere. Maybe even in the United States.

By Sam Pizzigati


Mainstream political leaders in the world’s developed nations have been suffering from political amnesia — on tax policy — for over 30 years now.

In the generation before 1980, the world’s top industrial nations routinely subjected their highest income brackets to tax rates as high as 70 and 80 and even 90 percent.

But then conservatives swept to power in Britain and the United States — Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Ronald Reagan in 1980 — and obliterated steeply graduated progressive tax rates. By 1986, no dollar of income that America’s richest reported would face more than a 28 percent tax rate. In the UK, the top rate would plummet from 83 to 40 percent.

Top tax rates in other developed nations would soon follow the same trajectory — and then largely settle down, after some bouncing around, within a narrow range that ran from 35 percent in the United States to 40 percent in Britain. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/on-taxing-the-rich-a-top-pol-breaks-ranks/