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Comment by qclibre22 | Hacker News Reader

U.S. has had periods of deflation: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i... . As recently as 2009.

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Down 0.4 - after a 3.8% rise the year previous.

Not exactly the strongest counterexample I've ever seen, though (barely) technically correct.

And the last deflationary "period" (a single year) before that was ... drumroll... 1949, following 3 years of >8% inflation.

It's called the ratchet effect. The government doesn't like giving your money back. That's why taxes almost never go down, either - e.g. the "temporary" income tax that only affects the richest 1% of people..

Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product : https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Yes. Share ~ steady, but GDP growing - tax income growing.

Taxes have been going down consistently for 50 years in the US.

what

Both the marginal [0] and effective [1] tax rates have been trending downwards since WW2 with relatively little deviation from that. Pus this doesn't take into account all the ways wealthy people can avoid creating taxable income in the first place that generally aren't possible at lower income levels.

0. https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...

1. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-...

"For the top 1%"

On average, aka the vast majority of tax revenue, it's stayed constant according to your own source.

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