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Remember the 1950's?

Dittohead not! said:
Well, unless you're an old guy like me, probably not, but one thing you need to understand about that era in which we were able to build the interstate highway system and help rebuild Europe without incurring a debt we can't pay is the way the tax system has changed since then:

View attachment 67266145

When Democrats talk about the rich paying more, consider a little bit of history. Check it out here
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Effective Tax Rates are the result of the deductions allowed under law. Tax rates all by themselves leave out most of the laws regarding taxation of income.

I suppose a half a truth is better than none.

Taxes on the Rich Were Not Much Higher in the 1950s | Tax Foundation

<snip>
The data shows that, between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes.

Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall.

In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent.
<snip>

The graph below shows the average tax rate that the top 1 percent of Americans have faced over the last century. The data comes from a recent paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman that attempts to account for all federal, state, and local taxes paid by different groups of Americans over the last 100 years.[2]

<snip>
 
PoS said:
Um, no. The most prosperous period in American history was during the Gilded Age, a time with no income tax, welfare, minimum wage, or Fed Reserve.

Economy in The Gilded Age
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If by prosperity you mean increase in the robber barrons' income so great that it drove up the average for everyone even though most everyone else didn't see a dime... sure.
 
poweRob said:
If by prosperity you mean increase in the robber barrons' income so great that it drove up the average for everyone even though most everyone else didn't see a dime... sure.
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They tend to forget that the word average actually means something.

If Bill Gates walked into the local bar, its a guarantee that the average salary of everyone in the place on paper is easily 9 figures. The mean? Not so much.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Well, unless you're an old guy like me, probably not, but one thing you need to understand about that era in which we were able to build the interstate highway system and help rebuild Europe without incurring a debt we can't pay is the way the tax system has changed since then:

View attachment 67266145

When Democrats talk about the rich paying more, consider a little bit of history. Check it out here
Click to expand...

Well there is the tax rate and then the effective tax rate. Deductions, loop holes, tax avoidance, changes in behavior to legally move money around. I get how seductive it is to "tax" the 1 percent - but you just can't honestly throw up a charge looking at top line tax rates without looking at the underlying tax code.

2019-10-14_7-55-28.jpg
 
Jay59 said:
Your last sentence is correct, though I doubt you intended it that way. You said that heavy taxation did not hurt the economy, then said the opposite was true, contradicting yourself. You have it right the second time.

The main point is that heavy taxation of the rich did hurt the economy. Even with the 70% top marginal rate, the resulting surge was massive.
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No, I had it right. Heavy taxation of the rich was the best thing that ever happened to this country. And Reagan ruined that in the early 1980s with his massive tax cuts for the rich.
 
code1211 said:
Effective Tax Rates are the result of the deductions allowed under law. Tax rates all by themselves leave out most of the laws regarding taxation of income.

I suppose a half a truth is better than none.

Taxes on the Rich Were Not Much Higher in the 1950s | Tax Foundation

<snip>
The data shows that, between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes.

Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall.

In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent.
<snip>

The graph below shows the average tax rate that the top 1 percent of Americans have faced over the last century. The data comes from a recent paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman that attempts to account for all federal, state, and local taxes paid by different groups of Americans over the last 100 years.[2]

<snip>
Click to expand...

The Tax Foundation is a conservative, business-oriented think tank that believes in lower taxes. They have an obvious agenda and little weight should be given to what they have to say. They are trying to convey a message that high taxes on the rich hurt the economy, when it doesn't.
 
PoS said:
Um, no. The most prosperous period in American history was during the Gilded Age, a time with no income tax, welfare, minimum wage, or Fed Reserve.

Economy in The Gilded Age
Click to expand...

It was prosperous for the rich, genius. Definitely not prosperous for the vast majority of Americans. And it all came crashing down because our government finally realized that most Americans living in poverty was not a very good idea.
 
poweRob said:
If by prosperity you mean increase in the robber barrons' income so great that it drove up the average for everyone even though most everyone else didn't see a dime... sure.
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Wrong, Rob. The American middle class came about during that time period. Many rich men also became philanthropists. I know lefties hate facts, but it is what it is.

Kerry Won Ohio said:
It was prosperous for the rich, genius. Definitely not prosperous for the vast majority of Americans. And it all came crashing down because our government finally realized that most Americans living in poverty was not a very good idea.
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Read the link I gave, because it proves you wrong.
 
PoS said:
Wrong, Rob. The American middle class came about during that time period. Many rich men also became philanthropists. I know lefties hate facts, but it is what it is.
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Then fact me up on what happened to that highly prosperous robber barron era again?
 
poweRob said:
Then fact me up on what happened to that highly prosperous robber barron era again?
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Well since you refuse to read, I'll humor you:

Economy in The Gilded Age

In 1860, the nation's total wealth was $16 billion. By 1900, it was $88 billion. This translated into a per capita increase from $500 to $1,100. Driving this growth was an explosion in American manufacturing—in 1869, the manufacturing sector of the economy generated $3 billion, a figure which rose to $13 billion by 1900. This was accompanied by an increase in America's labor force from 13 million to 19 million people.

Second, these growing industries generated goods for growing urban markets. During the Gilded Age, America's cities exploded. By 1900, America's 30 million city dwellers represented 40% of the American population—up from 20% in 1860. About half of these new urban residents were immigrants, the vast majority of them from Europe. During the 1880s, five million people came to America from overseas. During the 1890s, immigration slowed—but there was still a net arrival of 3.7 million people from abroad.

Fourth, financing for all of this came from an increased supply of capital—and from capital derived from new, more extended sources. Earlier in the century, most capital used for industrial expansion had come from the expanding companies themselves. But in the decades after the Civil War, individual personal savings increased and a whole new batch of institutions were created to capture and make available those savings to business borrowers—commercial banks, savings banks, and insurance companies all provided new vehicles for accumulating and dispensing the capital needed to fuel American economic growth.
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Without the non regulated markets of that era, the American middle class would never have come about.
 
PoS said:
Well since you refuse to read, I'll humor you:

Economy in The Gilded Age



Without the non regulated markets of that era, the American middle class would never have come about.
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Quite the hyperbole. Regulation or the lack thereof had nothing to do with the explosion of technology and moving from an agrarian economy to a industrial one. You are falsely just conflating what happened around the same time. It's about as sensible as saying that we landed on the moon because... the manson family.

What happened was similar to the dotcom era but much bigger. New tech came along, and because we didn't regulate it, it caused a massive bubble which then burst and hurt our economy repeatedly. Bursts that don't hurt the robber barons but destroy the middle class and lower.
 
Kerry Won Ohio said:
No, I had it right. Heavy taxation of the rich was the best thing that ever happened to this country. And Reagan ruined that in the early 1980s with his massive tax cuts for the rich.
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Didn't Congress go along with, enable, those tax cuts?
 
Kerry Won Ohio said:
On the flip side of that -- Something to keep in mind is that "luxuries" were much more expensive back then than they are today, when accounting for inflation. For example, a color TV was very expensive to own for someone living in the 1960s. That was true for virtually all appliance items (refrigerators, microwaves, dishwashers, etc.).
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Black and white TV was available in the '50s, but not everyone had one. If you lived outside of the city, there might be no reception. Otherwise, you might have two or three snowy channels if your antenna was tall enough. Color TV came out in the early '60s, and was both very expensive and limited. Most programs weren't in color anyway. Few people had color TV. The Radarange, first microwave, must have been sometime in the '70s. Most kitchens had a refrigerator in the '50s, but it didn't have things like an ice maker or auto defrost. Dishwashers? I don't remember when people started having dishwashers.

Greatest invention of that era was the polio vaccine, hands down.
 
PoS said:
Well since you refuse to read, I'll humor you:

Economy in The Gilded Age



Without the non regulated markets of that era, the American middle class would never have come about.
Click to expand...

Yeah.....**** child labor laws and worker protections....the upper crust was living it the **** up at the expense of the rest of the people. Again.....50 people making a ****load of money will upset that precious average income you keep talking about. It brings it up artificially.

You hardly ever see pictures of the life the average person lived during the Gilded Age because pictures of destitution and squallor simply dont play as well as pictures of palatial estates and gold leaf everything.
 
Kerry Won Ohio said:
No, I had it right. Heavy taxation of the rich was the best thing that ever happened to this country. And Reagan ruined that in the early 1980s with his massive tax cuts for the rich.
Click to expand...

You had it backward. Heavy taxation stifled the economy. Reagan's tax cuts fueled the longest peacetime expansion in history. It ran all the way to the end of Clinton's term and allowed us to briefly balance the budget. Trump's cut have led to significant growth exports. Tax cuts have always led to expansion in the economy.
 
poweRob said:
Quite the hyperbole. Regulation or the lack thereof had nothing to do with the explosion of technology and moving from an agrarian economy to a industrial one. You are falsely just conflating what happened around the same time. It's about as sensible as saying that we landed on the moon because... the manson family.

What happened was similar to the dotcom era but much bigger. New tech came along, and because we didn't regulate it, it caused a massive bubble which then burst and hurt our economy repeatedly. Bursts that don't hurt the robber barons but destroy the middle class and lower.
Click to expand...

That's right, they had little to do with the explosion of technology. Unregulated markets did, however have a lot to do with the depression of 1873, of 1893, of 1929, and the recession that would have been a depression without the government safety net of 2008.
 
OscarLevant said:
Absurd. the upper one percent own something like half the nation's wealth. You don't have to touch the middle class, and 60k a year is lower middle class in CA.
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The OP was talking about INCOME tax rates. You could, conceivably, make up the difference with a wealth tax but once you liquidate all that wealth then what do you plan to tax? A wealth tax would be the end of the US economy. Anyone with anything to tax would move away. The wealth would be gone and the need to tax would still be there. What will your people propose then?
 
PoS said:
Um, no. The most prosperous period in American history was during the Gilded Age, a time with no income tax, welfare, minimum wage, or Fed Reserve.

Economy in The Gilded Age
Click to expand...

Ah yes, the age of lynching, child labor, the Haymarket riots and framing of labor leaders who fought for an eight hour day, the Ludlow massacre, the kidnapping of 1300 striking miners in Bisbee, AZ. There were also seven day work weeks and a sign that said “If you don’t show up Sunday, don’t show up Monday.”

Who doesn’t long for the glory days of yesteryear.
 
It will never be the 50's again.

Tax the ****ing rich and be done with it. This wishlisting garbage and day dreaming is the stuff of nightmare, an extension of baby boomer garbage that has usurped our political process and replaced it with protectionism for the most greedy, self serving and thin skinned batch of entitled **** heads this country has ever seen; the baby boomer generation -are the problem.-
 
Middle_Ground said:
Before we do anything with personal taxtation I want to know what the corporate taxes will be. We keep talking about individuals and personal income tax but no one seems to be talking about what exactly the corporate contributions should be especially related to healthcare contributions. Especially since corporations were deemed "people" by the supreme court.
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Corporations have always been considered as legal persons. Otherwise, a corporation could not enter in a contract. Citizens United did not create this concept.
 
Obscurity said:
It will never be the 50's again.

Tax the ****ing rich and be done with it. This wishlisting garbage and day dreaming is the stuff of nightmare, an extension of baby boomer garbage that has usurped our political process and replaced it with protectionism for the most greedy, self serving and thin skinned batch of entitled **** heads this country has ever seen; the baby boomer generation -are the problem.-
Click to expand...

I find it amusing that many people who would (rightly in my view) be astonished and offended at the bigotry of characterizing people based on their race, will readily make bigoted characterizations about people based only on the year they were born.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Well, unless you're an old guy like me, probably not, but one thing you need to understand about that era in which we were able to build the interstate highway system and help rebuild Europe without incurring a debt we can't pay is the way the tax system has changed since then:

View attachment 67266145

When Democrats talk about the rich paying more, consider a little bit of history. Check it out here
Click to expand...

And then along came Johnson's "Great Society" and the cancer of entitlements...……….

Even Kennedy said the tax rate was ridiculous.
 
Lutherf said:
The OP was talking about INCOME tax rates. You could, conceivably, make up the difference with a wealth tax but once you liquidate all that wealth then what do you plan to tax? A wealth tax would be the end of the US economy. Anyone with anything to tax would move away. The wealth would be gone and the need to tax would still be there. What will your people propose then?
Click to expand...


This idea that a wealth tax would be the end of the US Economy defies the fact that wealth taxes have been in existence for a long time. Ever heard of the estate tax, ever heard of property taxes?

No, the sky didn't fall nor will it with Warren's wealth tax. The trick is not to over do it, which is why Warren's tax is like, what, two percent above some egregiously rich point? I"m not seeing anything disastrous on the horizon with it.
 
vanceen said:
I find it amusing that many people who would (rightly in my view) be astonished and offended at the bigotry of characterizing people based on their race, will readily make bigoted characterizations about people based only on the year they were born.
Click to expand...

Sorry, what I post is fact. End of story.
 
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