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This chart doesn’t show evidence of a particularly dramatic cut in effective rates for the top 1% of earners: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-hig

This chart doesn’t show evidence of a particularly dramatic cut in effective rates for the top 1% of earners: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/ https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/

jacobolus 8y ago
The top 1% of earners today earn a dramatically larger share of total income than the top 1% in the 1950s. If taxes kept up, they would have noticeably higher effective tax rates than they used to have. P.S. The “Tax Foundation” is a right-wing “think tank” (i.e. activists masquerading as researchers) funded by billionaires and corporations. I would however recommend reading the whole paper they cite, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf > Government redistribution made growth more equitable, but only slightly so. After taxes and transfers, income in the bottom quintile stagnated (+4%) over the 1980–2014 period while it grew a meager 21% for the bottom 50% as a whole. That is, transfers erased about a third of the gap between macroeconomic growth (61%) and growth for the bottom half of the distribution (+1% before government intervention). Taxes did not hamper the upsurge of income at the top, which grew almost as much as pre-tax. > The top panel of Figure II provides a granular view of who benefitted (or not) from growth, by showing the annualized real growth of pre-tax and post-tax income for each percentile of the distribution over the 1980–2014 period, with a zoom within the top 1%. There are two striking results. First, the vast majority of the population—from the bottom up to the 87th percentile—experienced less growth than the (modest) macro rate of 1.4% a year. For instance, the 10th percentile declined by 0.6% a year pre-tax (+0.3% post-tax); the 30th percentile stagnated pre-tax and grew 0.6% post-tax; the 80th percentile grew 1.2% pre-tax (+1.3% post-tax). Only the top 12 percentiles of the population achieved a growth rate as high or higher than the macro rate of 1.4%. Second, even percentiles 88 to 98 experienced unimpressive income gains, between 1.4% and 2.2% a year—in most cases less than the macro growth rate of U.S. incomes for the preceding generation, from 1946 to 1980. The only group that grew fast is the top 1%, whose average income increased 3.3% pre-tax and 3.2% post-tax, with growth culminating at +6.0% a year for the top 0.001%. The top 1% has pulled apart from the rest of the economy—not the top 20%. etc.

jacobolus 8y ago

The top 1% of earners today earn a dramatically larger share of total income than the top 1% in the 1950s. If taxes kept up, they would have noticeably higher effective tax rates than they used to have. P.S. The “Tax Foundation” is a right-wing “think tank” (i.e. activists masquerading as researchers) funded by billionaires and corporations. I would however recommend reading the whole paper they cite, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf > Government redistribution made growth more equitable, but only slightly so. After taxes and transfers, income in the bottom quintile stagnated (+4%) over the 1980–2014 period while it grew a meager 21% for the bottom 50% as a whole. That is, transfers erased about a third of the gap between macroeconomic growth (61%) and growth for the bottom half of the distribution (+1% before government intervention). Taxes did not hamper the upsurge of income at the top, which grew almost as much as pre-tax. > The top panel of Figure II provides a granular view of who benefitted (or not) from growth, by showing the annualized real growth of pre-tax and post-tax income for each percentile of the distribution over the 1980–2014 period, with a zoom within the top 1%. There are two striking results. First, the vast majority of the population—from the bottom up to the 87th percentile—experienced less growth than the (modest) macro rate of 1.4% a year. For instance, the 10th percentile declined by 0.6% a year pre-tax (+0.3% post-tax); the 30th percentile stagnated pre-tax and grew 0.6% post-tax; the 80th percentile grew 1.2% pre-tax (+1.3% post-tax). Only the top 12 percentiles of the population achieved a growth rate as high or higher than the macro rate of 1.4%. Second, even percentiles 88 to 98 experienced unimpressive income gains, between 1.4% and 2.2% a year—in most cases less than the macro growth rate of U.S. incomes for the preceding generation, from 1946 to 1980. The only group that grew fast is the top 1%, whose average income increased 3.3% pre-tax and 3.2% post-tax, with growth culminating at +6.0% a year for the top 0.001%. The top 1% has pulled apart from the rest of the economy—not the top 20%. etc.