In the postwar years, we did well in spite of high taxes. How could we not do well. Europe was reduced to a cinder, most of the industrial world had smashed industries right along with their cities. Japan was destroyed. Germany was in rubble and England was in the rubble that German made! 16 industrialized nations in West Europe had no infrastructure and no economy. As the last nation capable of producing anything at all, the United States had no competition.
Of course the tax policies weren't used to strengthen the economic solvency of the middle class. How ridiculous! Do you know absolutely nothing of history at all? The high taxes were necessary to recover from the war effort, reinvent and retool factories for peacetime. Then the taxes necessary to help Europe and Japan recover! How much did the Marshall Plan cost? Read it yourself.
http://www.ambrosevideo.com/resources/documents/53.pdf
This doesn't even consider what we spent in Japan.
Everyone was buying stuff made in America because no one else was making anything. Now you have a sustained economic growth by virtue of circumstance. The circumstance being the only viable game in town.
I agree that US industrial supremacy was an effect of what WWII. Also, Nixon had yet to open China. India was still in the embryonic stages of becoming a genuine economic powerhouse.
I disagree that tax policy wasn't used to strengthen the middle class. Even Reagan supported high taxes on the wealthy as governor of California ... to subsidize the greatest public university system in the world. He campaigned on giving the middle class greater access to higher education. His father was saved by an FDR work program. He campaigned for Truman. He was a New Deal Democrat until the party moved radically toward the LBJ Welfare state, where support was increasingly in the form of hand outs. Read his early autobiography entitled "Where's the Rest of Me?" Be careful with rightwing news sources. Best to go to something he authored.
In 1954 when Reagan entered the top bracket because of his Warner Brothers Salary, he started to get sick of how much the government was taking from his paycheck. This lead him to eventually campaigning for Goldwater (where he gave his famous "Time for Choosing Speech"). Eventually he succumbed to the Chicago School echo chamber and the trickle down theory which held that the market would take care of everything, including expanding educational opportunity (...but he still governed California like a moderate Democrat, save his abortion policy, which was the most liberal ever passed. He was an opportunist who never set foot in church, but realized as President that he needed the Moral Majority to replace Leftwing workingman populism with far right values populism).
Anyway, Since we started divesting from the public university system - which started in the 80s in order to give larger tax cuts to the wealthy - we've seen an explosion in middle class debt. Families have seen their wages destroyed by globalization, while their college tuitions have skyrocketed. This is why there has been an explosion in household debt starting in the 80s. America went from bubble to bubble to make up for both disappearing wages and the slow unwinding of investment in the middle class. Subsidies slowly went from our great public university system to special interests in every sector, big oil being chief among them.
Big money captured Washington and moved investment from the middle class and infrastructure to the strengthening of mega-corporations, who have been awarded monopolies over most sectors. You've been told that it's a free market, limited only by government. You don't get it. Business funds elections and writes their own regulations. Eli Lilly doesn't want a free market. They want to buy congressmen so they can squeeze our foreign and generic drug makers, and then lock the entitlement drug purchases into above market costs. They staff government and construct their own regulations.
You've been lied to.
[Another thing, unrelated. Did you know that Reagan used the Cold War to strengthen the global market system? He used the Soviet Threat to pull vital resource regions under the eagle's protective wing. There was an economic basis to the Cold War that all the evil empire bluster never accounts for. Did you notice how the 3rd world emerged from the Cold War? Our clothing comes from places like Vietnam and Grenada. We weren't fighting the Russians so much as constructing markets. The Soviets, like the terrorists, gave us a context for intervention in vital regions. I actually think that using the Cold War as a context for globalization was beneficial on some levels, e.g., the USA had the cheapest energy costs for decades, and we pay very little for raw materials (until you factor in the Pentagon costs for stabilizing the globe, which costs Reagan tried very hard to hide. Carter asked him to put the military cost into a barrel of oil, so the market could get the proper signal and not over-invest. Reagan ignored him and dug our grave. Stabilizing the middle east has been a fiscal nightmare). I'm just amazed at how little the Right knows about this. They are stuck in Hollywood narratives about fighting evil doers. They know nothing of the economic sub-structures. Big nations require resources. War is never about evil-doers. It is about shaping the globe in a way that benefits your economy]
That's what passes for 'journalistic integrity' with the HuffPuff. 
