Indirect response from Malcolm Gladwell to Bobo's taxless utopia where the government supplies the love and blocks of cheese.
gladwell.com: CEO Pay After reading the article in the New York Times yesterday on the hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation given over the past few years to the CEO of Home Depot, I ran across this: in 1949, the highest paid CEO in America was Charlie Wilson of General Motors, who earned $586,100 in salary, bonus and stock. That's roughly equivalent to what some of the better-compensated CEO's are making today.
But what did Wilson pay in taxes? $430,350.
and from the comments:
According to the IRS, the highest tax bracket in 1949 was 82.13% and applied to incomes over $400,000.It went up to 92% a couple years later!
Glad that our long national nightmare of prosperity is over, thanks to the Supply Sider cultists who keep getting elected/appointed.
How much net worth does any one individual need anyway? How much is enough?
Interesting that such libertarian(?) economic thinkers are unaware of the irony inherent in proposing no taxes. Communism is meant to end in the same situation!
On the post you linked back to, Bobo's taxless utopia, The idea of tax cuts to the rich increasing general wealth was one of Margret Thatcher's policies in the eighties, under the banner of a "trickledown economy". Strangely it failed to have the intended effect...
Yes, the Iron Lady was very influential on this side of the pond too. (Or could have been the other way around - Thatcher influenced by the Regan team).
You are absolutely right though: hasn't seemed to work as well as they claimed it would, at least publically claimed. I suspect the true goal was just to make the rich richer, and that seems to have worked splendidly.
It is a throughly discredited idea here - meaning it has to be described in other ways when any party wants to push that agenda. In the end it was the increase in the sense that things were becoming more and more unfair that ended her Prime Ministership. But then UK society is further to the left than the US. About half way between it and the rest of Europe.
The ironic thing is it was discredited here too, but then about 20 years later, they pushed it through again, with similar results. You'd think they would have paid attention to the result.
That'll be the day!