A lot of people do not realize that the wealthy are overly taxed as it is. In 2019, the top 1%, or taxpayers with an Average Gross Income of $546,434, paid $612 billion in income taxes, and paid 39.9% of ALL federal income taxes. To contrast, the bottom 90% paid $461 billion in income taxes. Yes, there are sleezy tax shelters and offshore accounts, but that is a different (legal) matter than income taxes. For instance, Bezos does not pay personal income tax because his various companies are the ones being paid out. Basically, he incorporated himself :-) (kind of)

The US once had a 70% tax rate for the rich. This rate was set in place during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. (1953-1961) During this time, the highest tax rate reached as high as 91%, with the lowest rate being 20%.

While the lowest rate gradually decreased, the top rate of 70% remained in place until the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, signed into law by President Reagan. This Act decreased the highest marginal tax rate to 50%, before it finally settled at 28% in 1988.

This reduction in the tax rate was a major factor in the 1980s economic boom. People had more to spend, to build, to play with.

Lynda

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By Hank Berrien
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Mar 7, 2024

Snip

During President Biden’s State of the Union, he will unveil his plan to raise the minimum corporate tax by a whopping 40% as well as implement a tax on the rich that would be at least 25%.

Biden would raise the corporate tax rate to 28% and the corporate minimum tax to 21%. Currently, the minimum corporate tax rate stands at 15% after Biden implemented that earlier in his presidency. Biden would also refuse companies tax deductions for employees making over $1 million. “The President is proposing to levy a 25 percent minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01 percent, those with wealth of more than $100 million,” the White House stated.

Former President Trump, the presumptive GOP 2024 presidential nominee, would reportedly make the tax cuts he implemented in his first term – which reduced corporate taxes from 35% to 21% — permanent.

During Trump’s administration, the four quarters preceding January 2019 saw real gross domestic product soar more than 3 percent, the best since the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency 13 years before.

Wharton Business School finance professor Joao Gomes, who was awarded the University of Pennsylvania’s Marshall Blume Prize in 2018, recently warned that the nation’s massive $34 trillion debt could presage an economic meltdown in 2025.

“As we discuss promises about ‘what we’re going to do with tax and programs,’ it’s going to be important to put it in the context of ‘Can we afford that?’” Gomes told Fortune. “It’s a really obvious moment in history for us to say: ‘Okay, what are our choices; what can we feasibly do; who has the better plan?’ I suspect neither party is interested in that, and it might all be pushed under the rug.”