taxing the rich, in historical perspective: Obama's taxes are LOW:

[amborin]

snip

"...It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.

What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now.

Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller....."

snip

this article also makes the valid point, that it would help to separate the rich from the merely well off

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=taxes%20under%20reagan&st=cse>

[Sgent]

1. Although I agree in principle

keep in mind that the tax structure was much different before 1986. Tax shelters, expense writeoffs, etc were huge compared to what's available today.

Effective tax rates (not marginal rates) may not have been much different than they are now.

[w4rma]

3. The country is going bankrupt and we're quibbling about a few percentage points on the people who

still CAN pay their taxes. Make them pay their taxes and pay the debt off! And if we aren't planning on paying the debt off then we need to just go ahead and tell said nations that we owe, that we aren't and there isn't anything they can do about it.

[Hippo_Tron]

2. But, but but Joe the Plumber will be put out of business

:evilgrin: