Then name those massive deductions.
Edit: or just drive by downvote, I guess.
Edit: or just drive by downvote, I guess.
https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/
> per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data ... The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today.
From 1979 onward: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/...
Highest effective tax rate, before Reagan's reforms, was 37% of the income of the top 1%
My understanding is it matched what's more typical in Japanese C-levels these days. You don't have a crazy salary, but your car is a company car, the company has a deal with the good schools to cover tuition for your kids, you don't pay for breakfast, or lunch ever because you'd be at the office so the company handles it, etc.
Edit: Guys, there's several ways to being down the marginal rate, deductions are only one of them.
https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-9...
In a nutshell, most expenses that businesses can still deduct were once deductible by individuals, the largest (by dollars) being interest deductions for any type of loan.
EDIT: I mean, their charts are blatantly mislabeled (even against their argument), showing a top marginal rate of over 90%. These people are just incompetent.
So it sounds like the incompetent one is...you...
And I'm not citing the Mises Institute for economic analysis, I'm citing it as one of the many dozen potential resources you could have looked at for the historical information you were asking for, namely the deductions that were lost in the 1986 tax reform.