‘Bush Tax Hikes?’

Posted By PK Last updated August 3rd, 2010 2 Comments

I recently posted on the ‘Bush Tax Cuts’, however, as Dr. Mark Perry points out, another way of looking at the Bush tax law is the ‘Bush tax hike’! Compared to the top marginal rate under Bush I and Reagan, the Bush II tax ‘cuts’ had a higher marginal tax rate on the highest bracket. In fact, as one of Dr. Perry’s commentators points out, the 2011 retirement of the Bush tax law could be considered another ‘Bush Tax Hike’ – as President Bush was the one who put an expiration date on the law.

For your reference, here’s a graph (from Wikipedia) of the top marginal tax rate since 1913:

Top Marginal Tax Rate by Year (Wikipedia)

So… how about revenues over time? I’ll have to write up a full post on it, but here’s the data, from the great Tax Policy Center. Fun!

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Filed Under: Economics, Politics Tagged With: dr perry, marginal tax rate, President Bush, reagan, tax hike

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It’s amazing the top marginal tax rates reached into the 90% range. I guess that’s where the Beatles song came from.

It is criminal for a government to take so much of a person’s income in a free nation. I think somewhere around the 35% range should be the top federal income tax rate. After that, the taxpayer still has to pay state, sales, property and estate taxes.

Most important, the Government needs to cut spending.
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Re: Tax Rate.
While I think it’s a bit crazy to top out the Marginal Tax Rate at 90% range, during the late 30′s and 40′s it was necessary. The policies of the Roaring 20′s left the USA a mess, a financial shell, and if we were going to survive as a country we had to do something. Unemployment at +20%, insane trading schemes (10% down for a stuck, and pay for the stock itself by the interest it generates). When that was over, that tax rate dropped back to something more sane.

I believe the economic management failures of the 80′s and 90′s are setting us up for another big crash, and the need, for the survival of the country, to crank up the marginal tax rate. IMHO Americans tend to forget that there are several economic games going on. We tend to concentrate more on ‘American Class’ conflict, rather than the class cooperation we need to have in order to compete in a global market as a country, or even considering ‘global class conflict/cooperation’ systems.