What Happens When You Tax Billionaires At 90%

[skews13]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:

“A number of my friends who belong in the very high upper brackets have suggested to me on several occasions of late, that if I am reelected president, they will have to move to some other nation because of high taxes here.
“Now, I will miss them very much...” (audience breaks into laughter)

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Edited to comply with copyright laws-meister

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

Tell me that you don't understand how economies work without telling me you don't understand how economies work.

 

[Auld Phart]

make Congress change the tax laws.

 

[Blues Man]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

You know what's really funny is that the people whining about billionaires are the ones who made those billionaires in the first place.

All you people allowing Farcebook, Instasham and Prik Tok to sell your information to advertisers are the ones who made all those billionaires and you're all too fucking stupid to realize it.

 

[fncceo]

tl:dr

 

[Rambunctious]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

Taxing every millionaire and billionaire of every dime they have would run the federal government for a week at best....
And thousands of people would lose jobs....

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

tl:dr

.

Leftist bloviation is not what I want to spend my Saturday on.

.

 

[MarathonMike]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.th

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

Only an economic retard thinks that a billionaire would hand 90 percent of his money to the US government. They are the most mobile people on the planet, change the tax laws and they'll take their billions to another country and the US economy and the workers who benefit from them suffer.

 

[elektra]

It is always nice to see how the Democrat's think. There is no place in the world for Democrats
History once again, repeats

 

[WinterBorn]

Why is it always between billionaires pay far less tax than the middle class or taxing them all they own?

Why not have billionaires pay the same rate that the middle class pays? I have paid between 25% and 33% for most of my adult life. Why not have them pay that?

 

[fncceo]

When people talk about Millionaires or Billionaires not paying their "fair share" .. they often confuse net worth with income.

A rich person may in fact have a large net worth with a relatively small taxable income.

There are no special tax laws or special low tax brackets for the rich (although they are often penalized with higher brackets ) that the rest of us don't also enjoy.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires At 90%​

You raise very little revenue.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate
No such thing.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

The median annual wage for chief executives was $179,520 in May 2021.

Top Executives : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Top executives plan strategies and policies to ensure that an organization meets its goals.

www.bls.gov

 

[fncceo]

Remember this ... the sleiziest rich person in the country, even if he cheats on his taxes, is still paying more in taxes that a whole army of Costco employees.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

Why is it always between billionaires pay far less tax than the middle class or taxing them all they own?

Why not have billionaires pay the same rate that the middle class pays? I have paid between 25% and 33% for most of my adult life. Why not have them pay that?

I have paid between 25% and 33% for most of my adult life. Why not have them pay that?

They pay at least 23.8%, minimum.

 

[ReinyDays]

When people talk about Millionaires or Billionaires not paying their "fair share" .. they often confuse net worth with income.

A rich person may in fact have a large net worth with a relatively small taxable income.

There are no special tax laws or special low tax brackets for the rich (although they are often penalized with higher brackets ) that the rest of us don't also enjoy.

The trick is running your income through as capital gains ... substantially less taxed percentage-wise than normal earned income ... dividend income tax is somewhere between earned income tax and capital gain tax ...

Donald Trump doesn't pay taxes ... he has income ... but he doesn't pay taxes ... is that fair? ... I think it is, and I don't pay taxes either ...

 

[Resnic]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

Well here's the thing.

When you become that rich all of your normal problems dissapear and you gain new problems that are just as cumbersome. Like trying to hang onto the money you earned from your company because everyone wants it.

Then there is also something noteworthy, no one wants to pay taxes. If you personally could afford tax attorneys that keep you from paying taxes you would in a heartbeat so don't even lie about that. The rich can afford tax attorneys and tax lawyers, we can not. They use their money to get advantages they can afford. Just like the middle class use their money for advantages the poor can not. So if you're going to blame billionaires and demand they pay then you should pay also because there are millions of people who don't have what you have. You're rich compared to others, and millionaires are rich compared to you, and billionaires are rich compared to them and everyone tries to hold onto what they have.

You should be thanking billionaires. There arent many of them but without them you wouldn't have smartphones, wifi access for your tablet you can use while sitting on a toilet in a air conditioned bathroom while flying through the sky in a plane, we wouldn't have gps in electric cars, or any of our modern conviences. Billionaires and their search for money are what drive innovations and create huge companies that employ 10s of 1000s of people. Without billionaires we wouldn't have a lot of what we do.

But most of all, after sitting through that giant wall of text I don't think you know anything about economics at all. You just know "billionaires bad" and then copy and pasted a bunch of shit because you're jealous you're not rich.

 

[DukeU]

Yea, let's steal more money from the doers and give it to the people who waste it.


U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time

 

[Dekster]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

You do know that not too many billionaires have stacks of million dollars bills sitting around their living room, right? most of their wealth is fantasy football statistics unless they actually sell out. So, you wealth tax bezos 90%--then what? Who is going to have the cash to buy him out, at what price, and who would want to when Uncle Same comes in next year and does the same to you? A wealth tax is just an incentive for China to get more of America on the cheap.

 

[OhPleaseJustQuit]

You do know that not too many billionaires have stacks of million dollars bills sitting around their living room, right? most of their wealth is fantasy football statistics unless they actually sell out. So, you wealth tax bezos 90%--then what? Who is going to have the cash to buy him out, at what price, and who would want to when Uncle Same comes in next year and does the same to you? A wealth tax is just an incentive for China to get more of America on the cheap.

.

That's the nature of the American dollar.

My husband didn't want me to buy metals, saying "You can't eat gold", to which I answered "You can't eat ones and zeros". He never got it.

.

 

[Papageorgio]

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and regulations minimal.

America’s billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) pay an average of around 3.1 percent as their functional income tax rate; as a result, America is the most unequal developed society in the world. The last time severe poverty and extravagant wealth coexisted in such extremes as today in this country was during the 1920s and 1930s.


Today we read about roving gangs doing smash-and-grab operations against retailers like Nordstroms and Home Depot; in Red states our schools are falling apart, defunded to pay for vouchers to all-white “Christian” academies; gun violence plagues our nation with particularly high homicide rates in rural Red states; and homelessness stalks city-dwellers at every turn.

The last time we saw the consequences of such inequality was during the Republican “Roaring ‘20s” 100 years ago, when Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, the morbidly rich openly bought our politicians, and gangs whose names are still known today roamed the country robbing and killing with impunity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to all that, and we need to repeat his example today.

FDR raised the top income tax bracket from 25 to 90 percent. Wealthy people in America screamed and yelled, claiming it would crash the economy, but instead that top tax rate kicked off the first middle class to encompass more than half a nation’s population in world history.

As Roosevelt noted in 1936:


FDR created America’s first widespread middle class with a combination of high taxes on the rich and strong unions for working class people. He broke the politically corrupt power of organized wealth for two generations.

Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use the word unions to describe labor organizations; it was such a novelty that newspapers of the day put the word in quotation marks. By the 1920s the union movement had seized the nation, but employers and Republican politicians were still using police, the army, and private armed militias to kill union leaders and intimidate people who wanted to join them.

Franklin Roosevelt put an end to that with the Wagner Act in 1935, fully legalizing unions. By the time Reagan took office in 1981 about a third of Americans had a good union job, and as a result fully two-thirds of American workers had union-level wages and benefits (because unions created the local wage and benefit floor for employers).

The people who were obscenely rich throughout the era from the 1930s to the 1980s had mostly inherited their money from their 19th century Gilded Age ancestors (the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Carnegies, etc.), because the combination of the 90 percent income tax bracket and union demands for meaningful wages kept inequality at reasonable levels.

Rich people were still rich, but that top income tax bracket combined with the power of unions kept the average CEO from taking much more than 30 times what their lowest-paid worker made every year. (Today, some CEOs make more than a thousand times what their workers make.)

FDR’s and LBJ’s social safety nets caught Americans before they could fall into the dire poverty that characterized earlier eras when Republicans ran the show. Social Security and unemployment benefits — both rolled out by FDR in the 1930s — lifted the elderly and the jobless out of poverty, and LBJ’s Medicare and Medicaid (1960s) kept Americans healthy.

The result of this was that crime went down and lifespans increased. When the grinding inequality of the Roaring ‘20s and the Republican Great Depression went away in the 1940s and 1950s, the crime sprees and hate-promoting demagogues went with it. Working people with decent wages and benefits, after all, have neither the time nor the need to engage in criminal activity.

Corporate executives lived and worked in normal — albeit upscale — neighborhoods (watch an episode of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1960s to see the homes Madison Avenue executives and media bigwigs lived in), and workers made enough to sustain a decent lifestyle.

Nonetheless, the morbidly rich campaigned relentlessly to take us back to the oligarchic 1920s, demanding tax cuts and union-busting. They funded media campaigns, think tanks, publications, judges and politicians.

In 1981 they got their guy into office; Reagan dropped the top tax rate all the way down to 27 percent and destroyed the nation’s air traffic controllers union as his opening salvo in the modern-day Republican War Against Workers.

Reaganism kicked off a 42-year-long explosion of wealth at the very top of our economic hierarchy, making today’s billionaires richer than the pharaohs. They compete with each other to see who can own the largest private jets and mega-yachts, multiple mansions all over the world, private islands, and even their own spaceships.

Disney’s old Scrooge McDuck comics (that I’m now reading to my grandkids) and their unfathomable money bins have come to life.

Simultaneously, the middle class began its collapse from two-thirds of us in 1980 all the way down to today’s 45 percent (and today it takes two incomes to sustain the same middle class lifestyle that could be done with just one when Jimmy Carter was president).

As the middle class collapsed, lifespans in America followed the same trajectory, unlike other countries in the world that rejected Reaganomics.

Source: Our World In Data
Reagan wasn’t alone in destroying the American Dream, however. He had big-time help from the nation’s highest court.

Five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court initiated the process with their First National Bank decision in 1978, which said that billionaire and corporate money wasn’t money but instead was a form of “free speech” and that corporations weren’t a legal fiction but instead were “persons” with full rights under the Bill of Rights, including the right to use their “free speech” to own politicians.

That decision, authored by the infamous Lewis Powell himself, made possible the purchase of the Republican Party by the morbidly rich in 1979, floating Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of corporate and billionaire (in today’s dollars) cash, much of it from the oil and banking industries.

Reagan then rewarded the GOP’s affluent paymasters with lower taxes, more tax-code loopholes, and a campaign of massive industrial and banking deregulation, giving particular preference via his EPA Administrator — the disgraced Anne Gorsuch (Neil’s mom) — to fossil fuel and other polluting industries.

So, here we are in a situation much like the one that FDR faced when he first came into office in 1933. Homelessness stalks the nation; three morbidly rich individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans; gun crime is at Bonnie and Clyde levels; and workers are terrified of their employers, who force them to sit through anti-union indoctrination sessions or lose their jobs.

To solve this crisis, we must gather and gain the political strength and will to once again raise the top income tax rate up to 90 percent; to overturn the Taft-Hartley Act and restore the right to unionize without interference; and to strip the poison of big money out of our political system.

The morbidly rich will squeal at even the mention of these tried-and-tested solutions, just like they did in the 1930s. They’ll warn that the country will collapse, or that communism will take us over and we’ll become Venezuela or Cuba. They’ll say that the “job creators” will go on strike like in an Ayn Rand novel and take the economy with them to Gault’s Gulch.

And, like FDR, we need to call them on their bullsh*t.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

“Succession” is over, but spoiled, entitled billionaire man-children are still very much with us, running social media companies, owning newspapers and television networks, and funding politicians and judges who then keep their taxes low and...

www.dailykos.com

Billionaires are the problem. Not the solution. Prosperity is created when the morbidly rich, and corporations are taxed at much higher levels. Not lower. Just like FDR proved beyond any doubt.

You have to be a total tool, to buy into the oligarch bullshit talking point, that low taxes and deregulation is what creates prosperity. Or you're a toady working for a billionaire selling that crap.

2009 through 2010 Democrats controlled the Presidency and the House and Senate and did not try yo raise taxes and in fact didn’t even repeal the Bush tax cuts? According to you this would have helped the middle class. Then 2020 through 2022 Democrats could have reversed the Trump tax cuts and raised the tax rate to 90%.

Also Obama was President during the largest transition of wealth to the rich in American history, maybe Democrats should practice what you preach.