Everyone is so afraid of progressive taxation. Look at where the fear has gotten us:
According to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, after earning less than 10 percent in the 1970s. This year the Bush tax cuts will give millionaires more in tax breaks than 90 percent of Americans will make in total income.
That’s Reaganonics for you, ladies and gentlemen. The conditions now resemble the conditions just prior to the Great Depression, so it may not be a coincidence that we’ve fallen into a Great Recession. Supposedly, however, this tremendous wealth at the top is what creates jobs for the little (small) people. It’s a curious way of looking at things because the best era for the middle class in this country was roughly from 1950 to 1973, and in that era the top rate never fell below 70%. It was 91-92% between 1951 and 1963, when JFK finally gave our elites a significant tax break. I don’t know how Ozzie and Harriet kept the lights on. Today, the top rate is 35% and Obama wants to let it go back to thirty-nine.
Not only is this a low rate in historic terms, but our government is running large deficits. And when you see people like Stephen Moore saying he’d like to see the bottom rate raised so that the top rate can be lowered, you know our elites are not even apologetic about looting our treasury on the backs of everyone else.
