I've seen repeated countless times recently that the marginal tax rate on the rich used to be as high as 91% Between 1950 and 1959, he notes, the highest earni

I've seen repeated countless times recently that the marginal tax rate on the rich used to be as high as 91% 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. <...> 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. https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-for-the-rich.html https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-...