I suspect, just based on my knowledge of greed and how rigged the government is in favor of the rich and monied interests, that there's been a continuous, systematic effort by a coalition of conservatives, wealthy interest groups, lobbyists, donors, Wall Street, and the big business elite to lower tax rates for the rich over the course of the past 60 years. JFK pushed for a tax cut, then Ronald Reagan, then George W. Bush, and the Democrats were never able to get it back to the higher rates pre-Kennedy. From what I've heard, weren't those 50's tax rates very very high?*
*Does anyone also know if there were surpluses or deficits in the 1950s?
Can anyone explain how this happened? Wouldn't we be able to have so much more revenue to do the things we all want to do: balance the budget, make huge payments to get us out of debt, and have the first surplus in 16 years if we simply just went back to a tax code where the people that actually had the most money to spare were asked to pay much higher rates?
Thanks... i just want to have some more information about it.. im not an economist so if you are, please explain (:
This is really not how it works. In the 1950s we didn't have the Alternate Minimum Tax, or AMT, which says that you cannot add up deductions past a certain point and that there is a minimum amount of tax you must pay. Without the AMT, creative accounting could easily lead to minimal or even no income tax actually paid. Basically no one was actually paying 89% of their income in income tax.
