Living in Phoenix, as I do, my daily newspaper is the, sigh, Arizona Republic, which, honestly, we subscribe to mostly for the obituaries. Morbid, I know.
I also, being somewhat masochistic, I guess, read the letters to the editor.
Mostly these are word for word rehashes of whatever garbage the writer heard most recently on Fox News. You can almost hear the spittle flying. It is sad. But it is true.
The other day, though, the Republic printed one from a fellow from Sun City, one of the myriad of bland, beige, boring, retirement camps--uh--I mean adult communities--which ring Phoenix like some breed of suffocating albino snake.
This guy was upset that the crazy socialists would tax away all the rich people. They would be forced to flee America if we tried to raise their taxes. And then where would we be without our rich people? He really meant it, too! He wasn't specific about where all those rich people would go. Couldn't be western Europe. Their taxes are higher than ours. Hmmm. Somalia? Venezuela? Russia?
Being a Sun City-ite, this guy must be of a certain age. Surely he remembers, fondly I'd guess, the 1950's. You know, that Trumpian paradise where blacks, browns, gays, women and students kept their mouths shut. Yeah. That place. The place that conservatives hunger to go back to with a passion that makes one blush. Blush, and then vomit.
Anyway, the top marginal tax rate, the rate the richest Americans theoretically pay, in the 1950's, the Eisenhower years, was 91 or 92%. That's right.
How about the Kennedy years? Same rate.
LBJ? Took a deep plunge to 75%.
Under I Am Not A Crook it was still at 70%. Yeah, that raving socialist Richard M. Nixon was president of a country with a 70% top marginal rate!
The top marginal rate for 2019 is 37%. You could double it, and still be below LBJ's rate, let alone JFK and Eisenhower's.
If things were so much better back then...maybe we should go back to those rates, just for nostalgia's sake. Just to make some people happy again...
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