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Go back to what the western world was doing in the 50’s. High tax and high public spending. In 1950 the US had a top marginal tax rate of 91%. The 50s were grea

• twoodfin 2y ago
  Federal receipts as a % of GDP has gone up and down by a few % but is basically unchanged from the 1950’s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN Meanwhile the income tax burden, specifically, has gotten considerably more progressive: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
  • raoulj 2y ago
    Is figure 4's legend correct from the NTU link? It would seem that the grey is the top 1%, not bottom 50%.
  • yndoendo 2y ago
    The NTU only goes back to the 1980s and does not actually include any analysis of the 1950s. Looks like NTU also is positing their stance on the ideology that the 1% are the only ones that create jobs but they are the ones to most likely invest in large corporations. There seems no prospect to help the mom and pop shops or small companies that have stronger solutions beyond what large corporate tunnel vision provides. My personal taxes keep going up with these "Tax Cuts". I don't expect them to come down with the push for tax cuts for the wealthy. Nor has my income gone up. Wouldn't buying more local would reduce energy used for transportation of goods and services? I see less Amazon purchases and deliveries as a net benefit for the majority and a net deficit for the wealthy investors. Wealth that stays more in the community versus being shipped to Wall Street.
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      The majority definitely benefits from being able to buy cheap Chinese goods and go on cheap Europe trips while $BIGCOMPANY vacuums up money from the rest of the world to prop up the USD. In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?
      • verall 2y ago
        > In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations? In Europe? They can just take a train. Young people backpack all over Europe on shoestring budgets.
      • yndoendo 2y ago
        This sounds like you are applying shifting baseline syndrome. [0] [1] [2] Another way to phrase shifting baseline is when people apply what they experience with an over weighted value. For example, the cost of living has skyrocketed in the USA compared to older generations, with the cost of a home, healthcare, and basic goods and services. Wages have been stagnant while the wealthy keep gaining more and more of economic power. Economic mobility is also quite low compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Those trips are most likely more cost effective compared to the 1950s because the technology was new and still evolving. Air travel was a luxury and now it is a commodity. Engineers have improved the technology to craft air plains while finding ways to reduce production cost. Cost savings have not be pushed to the working class and are shifted to the wealthy. If the wage increase of CEOs was linear with your wage. It would be higher and also be less of an economic for burden the masses. People over value the rare lucky ones as being the average of all. Kind of how a number of Americans are against taxing the wealthy because they believe they are or will become wealthy. It is rare to become wealthy and often those that are lacking in empathy and morals. Just like my Uncle that worked for Arbys, which is a millionaire because he believes and supports the idea that those below him should not be payed a living wage. At leas I learned from him that those franchises often run on debt because they try and pull out every last dollar into the owner's pockets. He was looking to become the owner but the debt was too great to buy in, as a millionaire. [0] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1794 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline [2] https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/ https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/
• pipes 2y ago
  And then what happened to those nationalised industries? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl0aCBpbnN0aXR1dGU%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl...
  • teamonkey 2y ago
    (Link from the Adam Smith Institute, a neoliberal thinktank)
    • linksnapzz 2y ago
      The story of British Leyland is enough to scare anyone w/ even half a brain away from ever allowing British politicians to have even the least bit of influence over a company that competes anywhere near the consumer space.
      • teamonkey 2y ago
        You mean how it was successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised, following its near-collapse as a private company? Or how in the Thatcher era, the government began to privatise and divest the most valuable parts of the company (and arguably a huge amount of British soft power) for little return to the taxpayer? Notably it sold Mini to BMW, Leyland to DAF, Jaguar and Land Rover to Ford. Privately-run Ford nearly went bust in the 2000s and famously had to be bailed out by the US taxpayer, but they sold off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in the process.
        • linksnapzz 2y ago
          successfully and profitably-run for over a decade part-nationalised, "successful" and "profitably run", taking into consideration the recommendation to Tony Benn that the Wilson gov't provide 1.2 billion pound investment; plus the buyout of existing BL shareholders at 1/5 the value of their shares, plus the pre-existing tariff regime, without even touching the product and manufacturing issues that had dogged them since the Austin-Morris days. Pigs can fly, if given enough thrust...Labor didn't fix BL, it just kept the shambolic structure upright, albeit canted at a weird angle. Jaguar was privatized in '84 (and nobody at BL was going to pony up money for new models) and only in '90 did Ford purchase it, for as it turned out, way too much. "Nothing wrong with this that a bulldozer couldn't fix" said a Ford exec after first touring the Jaguar plant on Brown's Lane in Coventry. Neither BMW nor Ford were ever able to make Land Rover work as a reliably profitable company. Also, Ford was never bailed out in 2008. Alan Mullaly hocked almost all of the company to get liquidity before the crash, which was prescient. After that, the entirety of the former Ford "Premier Automotive Group" (save for Lincoln) was jettisoned, as it was in the long term a money-loser. Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata, Volvo to Geely, and Aston-Martin to ...some Saudis.
• tick_tock_tick 2y ago
  I mean I think most billionaires would welcome the 1950s tax code. The reduction in their bills would be amazing! The only people paying those number would be our new "middle" class doctors, lawyers, etc people who make a lot of income but limited investments.
• orangecat 2y ago
  High tax and high public spending. Government spending was a slightly lower percentage of GDP than today (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S), and a whole lot of that was defense (https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and-international-context https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...). The 50s were great, let’s do that again. Assuming you're not a non-white person, or a woman who wants a career. Although getting rid of Medicare would certainly help the budget.
  • Chinjut 2y ago
    Is there something intrinsic to the general setup of government spending in the 1950s that makes it incompatible with equal rights for minorities and women? These would seem to be orthogonal issues.
  • sjducb 2y ago
    Obviously I’m talking about re-creating the economic policies of the 1950s, not the equality policies.
• milesrout 2y ago
  Nobody paid a 91% tax rate in practice. What a silly thing to focus on, a headline marginal tax rate nobody paid. The 1950s were great for places like the US, Australia and New Zealand because they were initially fairly unregulated (wartime planning was ended and the market took over) and they weren't destroyed by the war. The UK had rationing into the mid 50s while its empire crumbled. It was not some heavenly place. Millions left the UK for the new world, including my grandparents, because the UK was in a dire state. Over the next 20-30 years, the anglosphere became progressively more regulated, more taxed, more controlled, and more unionised. You needed a licence to import a new car. You needed a licence to import magazines. Exchange rates and interest rates were controlled by the government and adjusted for political purposes. Large parts of the economy were run inefficiently by the state as make-work schemes to prop up "full employment" policies that were politically popular but very expensive. The oil shock of the 1970s revealed how bad this scheme of economic management was at responding to changing conditions. When you have thea biggest economy in the world and you were untouched by a war that decimated your competitors it is easy to look good. But the system was not capable of responding to changing conditions because it was largely driven from the top down by bureaucrats and politicians for the sake of implementing their preferred social policies and winning elections respectively. In the 1980s, this came to a breaking point. This was true everywhere, but the clearest example is not the US or the UK but New Zealand. It nearly went bankrupt trying to maintain completely unsustainable exchange rates for political reasons and there was a small consitutional crisis when the outgoing government refused to implement the incoming government's instructions to lower the exchange rate. The economy was dominated by what were called "Think Big" schemes: government infrastructure projects that made no financial sense but looked good on election posters and "created jobs". Large numbers of businesses did entirely pointless things like assembling Japanese cars from components more expensively than could be done in Japan, because car imports were restricted. Many other examples exist. Agriculture was heavily subsidised by the state. The new governments in the 1980s (I am talking about the West generally now) did away with much of this rubbish. They lowered trade barriers, reduced or eliminated subsidies, and privatised the elements of the public sector that had no reason to be run by the public sector. Sometimes when privatised these businesses failed. But that wasn't because they were privatised, it was because they had never made any financial sense in the first place. The fundamental point is that the 1950s system was the same as the 1960s and 1970s system. If you go back to the 1950s, you also go back to the 1970s. The system was the same, the same incentives would exist, and the result would be similar. Give the economy over to the public sector and in a few years all thought of making what customers want and will pay for is substituted with using economic power to achieve social goals and win elections. We had better make sure we hire more Xs, they deserve more representation, and we better put money into Y, people love to hear about Y, and so on. And before long it is a lumbering inefficient mess.
• yardstick 2y ago
  That environment was directly proceeded by WW2, which required massive capital investment to rebuild Europe[1]. In the UK we were still rationing candy and meat during the early 50s[2]. So, I’m not particularly eager to recreate those conditions. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_King...