Marginal tax rates — especially for the top — used to be much, much higher.
Most Americans are shocked to discover that before 1982 when Reagan first implemented the fixation with tax cutting, income in the top bracket was taxed at 70%, and before that a whopping 91%!
In 1960, for example, any amount over $400,000, which equals $3.5 million in today’s dollars, was taxed at a 91% rate. So if you had the equivalent of $4.5 million in taxable income, you paid $910,000 in taxes on that last million and anywhere from 50% to 90% on the amounts over $276,000 in today’s dollars.
As we saw in my last diary, since the Tax Act of Dec 2012, any taxable income over $457,600 married or $406,750 single is taxed at only 39.6% (up from a decade at 35%). And if you get most of your money from capital gains and dividends like Mitt Romney, you pay only 20% — up from 15%.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Note: Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, high incomes also pay an additional 3.8% Medicare tax on net investment income over the $250,000 married/$200,000 single threshold.
As we see, the overwhelming majority of tax cuts have been skewed to the super-rich. Our measly tax cuts are just so we’ll carry the water and make the argument for the billionaire cuts.
Here’s a quick one-page history of the major changes to the tax tables from 1956 to 2013. Prepared to be shocked at how progressive our federal tax system used to be — even under Republicans like Eisenhower — before America’s ungrateful obsession with “tax relief” and not wanting to pay for the benefits of civilized society.
For a printable PDF of this flyer, see page 2 at this link:
http://www.connectthedotsusa.com/...