Makes sense in theory, but the second half doesn't always happen b/c politicians like buying votes with govt spending (either via under-taxation or over-spending, to the extent those aren't the same thing).
The belief was that the Federal Government had grown too large in the economy and needed to be "starved". To what extent government austerity vs. new monetary policy moved the needle for the US economy is unknowable. However many Americans of that generation feel that the starve the beast approach was correct.
If you talk to Americans opposed to new taxes, their opposition is usually based on the idea that the government will waste the money in one way or another. Even those on the left in favor of taxes are often in favor of taxes for redistribution purposes. It's rare that anyone pitches the government as competent outside of military spending, and even then there are many asterisks on 10k light bulbs in submarines.
If you want Americans to agree to taxes you'll need to change the perception of government competence.
Genuine question - do people see military as competent when it comes to spending?
I can't speak to dealing with insurgencies but it's clear to me that a mix of various administrations policies was to blame more than military effectiveness.
I mean was it the military or Paul Bremmer and co who disbanded the Iraqi military and unleashed a lot of chaos?
The first is that other Western countries could pick up the slack instead of having it fall disproportionately on the US. It only got the way it is because the others were mostly bombed out after WWII and that's no longer the case.
The second is that if the US spent less and did less military interventionism, adversarial countries might not feel the need to spend as much either, and then the balance of power stays the same while everyone spends less money on bombs and warships.
The US is the only one who can initiate this because they're the only ones who can reduce military spending without being threatened even if others don't.
This is why the fuels division I was in, we often bought new desk chairs every year and $500 pocket knives and parts we would never need. Literally had to throw parts away to make room for the new parts.
AFAIK the "90%" rate is highly misleading because at the time there were a lot of deductions that bring the effective rate much closer to today's levels. We can see this in the federal tax receipts as % of GDP, which remained mostly flat despite the top bracket dropping from "90%" to 37%
The Kochs, leaders of the "small government" movement are the heirs of a billionaire whoade his fortune building oil refinery for communist USSR government. They only dislike government when it helps the people instead of the oligarchs.
The media always dumps on the Kochs because, atypically, part of their agenda is anti-graft. Make the government smaller by reducing corrupt spending programs and regulatory capture. Most of the bureaucracies fight each other for resources but they're not trying to turn off the spigot. The one who does becomes a target for attack. So they're the ones you've heard of.
This is incorrect.
The 90% tax rate (and other notably high tax rates from that period) were temporary measures explicitly enacted to discourage war profiteering:
"The crisis of World War II led Congress to pass four excess profits statutes between 1940 and 1943. The 1940 rates ranged from 25 to 50 percent and the 1941 ones from 35 to 60 percent. In 1942, a flat rate of 90 percent was adopted, with a postwar refund of 10 percent; in 1943 the rate was increased to 95 percent, with a 10 percent refund." [1]
These were not tax rates analogous to any of our normal, peacetime rates and they were not enacted as progressive policy measures.
It is misleading and disingenuous to make any comparison between the tax rates we choose in modern peacetime which arise from political decisions about relatively progressive vs. regressive rates, etc., and these administrative rates designed to combat war profiteering and other behaviors related to a wartime economy.
Oh, I know which party he's talking about!
> "...and pay down that debt"
Huh, nevermind.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/no-bill-clinton-didnt-balanc...
The uproar about this change from Team Blue was palpable; this was clearly a targeted attack on liberal, high-tax areas. The cutoffs for the changes were well above an income level of $150K, which meant it went after the 'rich' that Team Blue always positions as the enemy, but none of that mattered.
Nobody wants more taxation when it actually hits their pocketbook. If there's anything the constituents of the two major political parties can agree on, it's that.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1127/1*86sURhsiwekHqCuqjbFnkQ.pn...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/donor-state...
California is a net recipient of federal money (though not by a lot). The biggest donors are the blue states in the northeast. But plenty of blue states are recipients and the biggest recipients are the swing states, because politicians shamelessly buy their votes.
And the reason the states in the northeast pay the most isn't because of state-level benefits reducing the need for federal programs (which rarely if ever happens). It's because those states are disproportionately the wealthy people who pay the most taxes.
But getting rid of the SALT deduction didn't care about that. Wealthy people in California lost more than equally wealthy people in New Hampshire, even though California is a net recipient and New Hampshire is a net donor, because New Hampshire has lower state and local taxes.
But then they weirdly push for the opposite to the financial detriment of their own constituents, including the lower income ones who could have higher state benefits than existing federal benefits if the feds weren't taking so much of their state's money.
Best guess for why this happens is that the blue team is more captured by government sector lobbyists at the federal level, who don't want to lose jobs to state level government workers.