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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I think you need a longer answer than this, because the marginal rate was indisputably higher than this before.

http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf - my reply was sufficient, you are just having trouble because it doesn't match with whatever you conclusion you jumped to without data.

Your own link states that there used to be a 70% marginal rate.

I think he means effective marginal rate. 70% is nice and all, but when you are able to deduct 40% of that, is it really higher than 30%?

“Effective marginal rate” is a nonsense phrase. We can discuss marginal rates or effective rates but you can’t combine the two.

I assume the other commenter is doing the standard, “that rate doesn’t really count because nobody really paid it.” Which is a perfectly good point, but it’s not accurately expressed by pretending that marginal rates weren’t that high.

You can absolutely compare effective marginal rates; if you have effective rate data by income level, you can calculate from that effective marginal rates, which are simply the effective rate on the difference between the nth and (n+1)th dollar.

OTOH, because one of the big ways this is manipulated is by income that isn't “counted” as income, getting good data from which to estimate effective marginal rates is tricky and you end having to make assumptions that are hard to validate.

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