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Perhaps not now, but for much of the post-war boom most countries had very high top rates of tax: 90%+, sometimes 98%, including in the USA. Corporate taxes wer
by NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Perhaps not now, but for much of the post-war boom most countries had very high top rates of tax: 90%+, sometimes 98%, including in the USA. Corporate taxes were much higher. We had the longest sustained period of growth in history. Obviously that's a progressive tax as only the very highest earners hit the top rates of tax. Many countries had full employment. Yet inequality was at some of the lowest levels ever recorded. Capitalism's golden age.
Business was doing just fine, and nations had enough income to provide generous and growing services. Wealthy people kept working. CEOs went to work quite happily. Wealth still concentrated at the top, just far, far less of it.
This only really broke with the arrival of the 73 oil crisis.
Seems like a return to something along those lines is long overdue to trim some of the excess greed.
- j7ake 7y agoIt's a nice description, but what was the wealth distribution in the 1920s in USA?
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoProbably fairly similar to now, considering it was the end of the period of attempts at reform after the Gilded Age. Reform that often deliberately avoided the problem and made it worse, and noted now as the period when the number with extreme wealth sky rocketed. Again like today the extremely wealthy were distorting the agenda via targeted philanthropy. We talk now of billionaires, they of millionaires, when a million was still a huge amount. Makes it very analogous to the scene after 2008, and the attempts at "fixing" the 08 banking crisis economy by not fixing the system but treating the symptom, or even climate change response. The 1920s wealth distribution and economy was structured to set the scene perfectly for the great 1929 crash and great depression. It remains to be seen how closely we track those... It took a global depression and the two decades leading through WW2 to fix. 1945 on was a very different era. And we forgot - or deliberately threw out - every single lesson and regulation.
- e40 7y agoI don't think people realize how these tax rates mobilized the rich to create the system we have today. The "no increase taxes" pledge that many Republicans take. Read this and it becomes clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
- foolrush 7y agoThen mobilize against them. This isn’t inevitable, despite the framing they spend many dollars to convince you of such.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoWhich just goes to show the total lack of ideas on the right these days, and why I grew away from supporting them. Thirty or forty years of the Reagan/Thatcher small government, bonfire of regulation and taxes and we're not yet anywhere near the halcyon days of a new golden age. Their prescription? Bleed the patient an eighth time, it's the only remedy still in the book. Lower taxes made some sense after the pain of the seventies oil shocks, and the myriad problems they caused, but now it's not even slightly credible. The amazing thing is how many are still taken in.