Once Upon a Time the US Taxed the Rich

[packman]

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.

In the early 1960s, America's richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket.

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 rich felt those taxes. The high life struggled. Consider what happened to one fabled emblem of that era's excess, the nation's first-ever penthouse.


...

A just-released report from the Congressional Budget Office helpfully paints a revealing picture. This new CBO study on the distribution of American income adds up all the changes "in household income, means-tested transfers, and federal taxes between 1979 and 2019."

Between those two years, the CBO data show, household income "after transfers and taxes"—and after adjusting for inflation—grew on average by 97 percent among households in the nation's most affluent 81st to 99th percentiles. In other words, America's affluent but not super-rich households saw their after-tax incomes about double in the four decades after 1979.

Households in the top 1 percent have fared considerably better. Wealthy Americans in the 99th to 99.9th percentiles—the bottom 90 percent of the top 1 percent—have watched their after-tax incomes nearly triple, rising 193 percent.

Within the rest of our super rich, the top 0.1 percent, we see even more striking leaps. Households in the bottom 90 percent of this top 0.1 percent have had their inflation-adjusted, after-tax incomes shoot up a stunning 367 percent.

And what about those households at the tippy top of our nation's income distribution? Between 1979 and 2019, average after-tax incomes in the top 0.01 percent of America's households skyrocketed 507 percent. These top 0.01 percenters averaged $30 million in 2019 after-tax income.








https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/03/once-upon-time-us-taxed-rich

[Beachnutt]

1. .

[GoodRaisin]

7. Pretty much speaks to who's running the country. nt

[CrispyQ]

2. To those who much as been given, even more will be given.

[yankee87]

3. Trickle down

We just have to give Ronnie Raygun’s trickle down tax rate more time. I mean it’s only been 40 years, be patient. The top 10% will throw some crumbs to us any day now.

[Lunabell]

4. And we have the infrastructure to show for it.

The Interstate. Roads. Bridges. Power grids. Etc. All crumbling now with no funds to fix them because Bezos needs another super yacht and musk needs twitter.

It's UnAmerican.

[Faux pas]

5. Kickin' with DISGUST

[chriscan64]

6. Look at the fit they threw when the proposal was to go from 36% to 39%.

All of the Christian right, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-semitism and racism is about adding voters so they can do this. Undoing the New Deal and going back to the gilded age of the 1890's is what they are all about. This is why a coup attempt and call for terminating the Constitution brings nothing but crickets or weak admonishment from their side.

If Obama or Bill Clinton had attempted a coup so they could raise the top rate, they would have been put in manacles on their way to the gallows.