Hacker News Reader

in the 1950s and later, the highest tax bracket was somewhere in the 90%s

Yes, but unfortunately no rich person actually paid those rates: "despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s."

https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

Your 42% is overall, right? The 90% was a marginal rate, the first bullet point at your URL.

That implies that significantly less than half of their income fell into the highest bracket. This is true of the top 0.01% as well (the top 1% of the top 1%), they paid about 50% overall.

So, the top 1% of the top 1% of high-income earners, found a way for their income that would fall into the top tax bracket, to not be income. They turned it into capital gains or something else. To not do so would be crazy, so literally no one let a significant amount of their income fall into the top tax bracket, in the 1950s.

The difference between 42% (1954) and 36% (2016) is massive, and we lowered their taxes even more since then!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com