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Bernie Sanders, who I fukk with, and AOC, need to be more truthful when they bring up these arguments. The 90% tax existed on paper. Very few of the rich actually paid anything near that. Put yourself into the shoes of a rich person. Imagine you're rich. Would you EVER give up 90% of your money when you can
easily and
legally shelter it in numerous ways?
Serious question right now. Taxing high incomes at 70% is not gonna help her cause because the people she's targeting make an exorbitant amount of their money off investment income. If she really wants to hurt them, she has to propose raising the capital gains tax rate. She has to fukk with real estate tax law. She has to put controls on how much money can be moved overseas, which is what China is trying to do now with their citizens. She has to put controls on how trusts are used. So many loopholes. Which is why the 90% tax rate never came into play for most of the rich back when it was around.
Almost no one paid that shyt. If anyone tries to fukk with the capital gains rate or any of those other things to actually effectively tax the rich, then yes, you will be depressing alot of those markets, as I said earlier. They'll just move their wealth elsewhere. To also avoid being disingenuous, the 90% tax kicked in at $200,000, which was equivalent of $2 million today so it was only a few people that law even targeted to begin with.
The 1% never paid anywhere near 90%
American progressives like to remember the mid–20th century as a time when the only thing higher than a Cadillac’s tail fin was the top marginal tax rate (which, during the Eisenhower years
peaked above 90 percent for the very rich). Uncle Sam took 90 cents on the dollar off the highest incomes, and—as any good Bernie Sanders devotee will remind you—the economy thrived.
Conservatives, however, often try to push back on this version of history, pointing out that those staggeringly high tax rates existed mostly on paper; relatively few Americans actually paid them.
Recently, the Tax Foundation’s Scott Greenberg went so far as to argue that “taxes on the rich were not that much higher” in the 1950s than today.
Between 1950 and 1959, he notes, the highest earning 1 percent of Americans paid an effective tax rate of 42 percent. By 2014, it was only down to 36.4 percent—a substantial but by no means astronomical decline.
Greenberg is not pulling his numbers out of thin air. Rather, he’s drawing them directly from a
recent paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman in which the three economists—all well-loved by progressives—estimate the average tax rates Americans at different income levels have actually paid over time. Their historical measure includes federal, state, and local levies—including corporate, property, income, estate, sales, and payroll taxes. And lest you think Greenberg is misrepresenting anything, here’s Piketty & co.’s own graph (rates on rich folks are shown in green).
There are a few obvious reasons why the taxes the rich actually paid in the 1950s were so much lower than the confiscatory top rates that sat on the books.
For one, the max tax rates on investment income were far lower than on wages and salaries, which gave a lot of wealthy individuals some relief. Tax avoidance may have also been a big problem. Moreover, there simply weren’t that many extraordinarily rich households. Those fabled 90 percent tax rates only bit at incomes over $200,000, the equivalent of more than $2 million in today’s dollars. As Greenberg notes, the tax may have only applied to 10,000 families.
To Greenberg, the takeaway from this is simple: Progressives should stop fixating on the tax rates from 60 years ago. “All in all, the idea that high-income Americans in the 1950s paid much more of their income in taxes should be abandoned. The top 1 percent of Americans today do not face an unusually low tax burden, by historical standards.