There were many reasons why the US economy thrived in the 50s, but that high tax rate wasn't one of them. It was a different time, different culture, different circumstances. To compare that time to this is apples and oranges IMHO. Why stop there, if you go back to the 1920s, you will see that the US economy took off when the tax rates were sharply reduced. What's your answer to that?
Then there are the examples of numerous countries who managed to achieve fiscal respinsibility mainly by cutting spending over the past 20 years or so. Some taxes did go up in most cases, but the ratio was heavily to the spending side. Start with Canada in the mid 90s, they got out of the hole they were in by curtailing their spending, not by raising taxes.
Solyndra?
I'm glad you brought that up -- the pathological liar running for POTUS on the Republican ticket is going to get his ass kicked for comparing Solyndra to his own vulture capitalism -- the ads are already in the can.
On balance, the White House seems to be playing Wall Street games—if that’s what you want to call massive investment in underfunded public infrastructure—pretty decently, and in a manner that produces more value for the public than private equity firms. Bain and Solyndra are really nothing alike. And by insisting that they are, Romney boosters have given Obama’s campaign an opening to brag about what American Crossroads is calling Obama’s public equity presidency—and all its successes.
Is asking voters to compare RomneyÂ’s vulture capitalism to Solyndra a good idea? The Romney campaign and its cohorts seem to think so. Within the past few days, American Crossroads, Karl RoveÂ’s super PAC, [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tjfQA4lkbo"]
released an ad[/ame] that counters ObamaÂ’s attacks on Bain by highlighting Solyndra, a bankrupt solar panel company that had been given a government-backed loan guarantee, as well as the auto industry bailout. George Will made the Bain-Solyndra comparison on
This Week; Paul Ryan did the same on
Fox News Sunday; Michael Barone piled on in
National Review Online.
The underlying argument is that the White House has been making the same risky bets as a private equity firm, bets that produced their own failures. (The grim-voiced narrator of the Crossroads ad, which is captioned, “President Obama is playing Wall Street games with our money,” asks, “Obama’s attacking private equity. But what’s his record on public equity investing?”)
It’s not the smartest response in the world. First off, Romney allies typically explain away Bain’s failures as just the way capitalism works—sometimes, bad companies are swallowed by the market. Solyndra, whose solar technology was priced out of the market by cheaper Chinese solar panels, is a pretty classic example of this, and by citing its Adam Smithian demise in response to attacks on Bain, Romney allies have diminished their ability to dismiss Bain’s loser companies as just the natural cycle of capitalism.
But the larger risk of this approach is that comparing any of BainÂ’s failures to Solyndra asks voters to examine private equity alongside public stimulus. The former is a game in which a tiny group of stakeholders set out to create as much value as possible for themselves: buying companies, often loading them up with debt they canÂ’t bear, and extracting exorbitant fees for themselves before they reintroduce the company to the public and it either fails or succeeds. ItÂ’s essentially a no-risk racket, one Timothy Noah describes in fuller detail
here.
Then thereÂ’s government stimulus, which is aimed at benefitting the public, and which the Obama administration has distributed with considerable success. Take the Department of Energy loan guarantee program through which the administration backed Solyndra. That program has been hugely effective for shoring up projects that the private market underinvested in. A recent,
independent audit (pdf) by the former national finance chairman for John McCain found that it was due to come in about $2 billion under budget, and had subsidized
mainly low-risk, critical electricity projects. The American Crossroads ad goes a step further and offers, as a comparison with Bain CapitalÂ’s failures, the governmentÂ’s auto bailout, which an independent group found
saved 1.45 million jobs, when
no private equity dollars could be found to do the same.
On balance, the White House seems to be playing Wall Street games—if that’s what you want to call massive investment in underfunded public infrastructure—pretty decently, and in a manner that produces more value for the public than private equity firms. Bain and Solyndra are really nothing alike. And by insisting that they are, Romney boosters have given Obama’s campaign an opening to brag about what American Crossroads is calling Obama’s public equity presidency—and all its successes.
But back to the subject of this thread--- how'd that 1920's lower taxes, credit bubble work out? Yep you're right, it worked out just about the same way the Bush tax cuts, buying stocks on margin, to easy real estate/consumer credit... -pewsh!-

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
I. The Great Inequality of the 1920s mirrored our own time
I just happen to not be among those ignorant souls who are ignorant enough to believe that a tax decrease to the wealthy is a stimulus of any kind. ~ Rshermr