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Comment by 12hasgt | Hacker News Reader

You get the money back the same way Roosevelt did, 94% tax rate on the rich.

The effective tax rates have went down modestly, but approximately no one was paying anywhere near that. They were playing the same financial engineered fuck fuck games that are played today to get around it. It's the poor and middle class that can't get around those tax rates.

Nobody paid those high tax rates. Everybody was writing off cars, home offices, hobbies, "business" dinners, and everything else.

The tax simplification that occurred in 1986 struck a bargain: We'll lower your tax rate, but we're not going to allow you to take all those BS deductions anymore. The effective tax rates barely budged.

An effective 94% tax rate is a huge drag on the economy, since it makes risk taking impossible to justify. You'd be stupid to start a business or invest in a startup at that rate. There's no surer way to throw half your work force out of work.

Wealth reform is needed more than any point in American history

Yea the covid money printing is regularly pointed to as a reason why MMT is clearly bad but that ignores that there’s literally a solution to this problem in MMT. Raise taxes to reclaim the money. It’s a trivial solution which is sadly politically incredibly challenging.

What a horribly dystopian thing to say

Huh what is dystopian about that? I’m just referencing how MMT prescribes to solve for inflation and the reality that it’s hard in a democracy to raise taxes.

> Raise taxes to reclaim the money

Only works if the government doesn't turn around and spend the money. And feeding dollar bills into a furnace just looks bad.

And yet, the amount of redistribution that's happening has never been higher, far exceeding the era of "94% tax rate on the rich", never mind that nobody actually paid that rate because the tax code was full of exemptions at the time.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...

Those graphs are about income, not wealth.

So was "the same way Roosevelt did, 94% tax rate on the rich"

No, that tax rate was on income, not wealth.

Are you trying to conflate the two?

I don’t see how this graph shows that claim. It says it’s graphing the effect of welfare on income ratios between top 10% vs the bottom 50% then just has an arrow pointing down saying “Stronger redistribution”

Where is the connection between the percentage being graphed and whatever their definition of “stronger redistribution” is?

And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.

>I don’t see how this graph shows that claim. It says it’s graphing the effect of welfare on income ratios between top 10% vs the bottom 50% then just has an arrow pointing down saying “Stronger redistribution”

The chart is supposed accompany an article, which explains what the metric is:

"""A simple measure of progressivity involves comparing the distribution of income both before and after tax. By this measure America redistributes about twice as much today as in the 1960s (see chart 1). Germany and Japan, the next biggest rich economies, also redistribute a lot more than they used to. So do Britain and Canada. Indeed by our estimate, seven in ten countries have more progressive tax-and-benefit systems than in 1990. The ones that have become less progressive tend to be dysfunctional (Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti) or were exceptionally redistributive to begin with (Norway, Sweden)."""

>And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.

1. If you read the original paper[1], they seem to be doing it for weird economics reasons:

"We then sequentially remove capital gains, which are not in national income"

I don't know enough about economics to dispute this, but given that they bothered to adjust for other factors like imputed rent and "corporation retained earnings", I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless there's convincing reason otherwise.

2. On page 16 they have an actual breakdown of all the adjustments, which lists the effect of removing capital gains at between 0.7% to 1.4%. In other words, not enough to change the conclusion.

[1] https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequal...

> The chart is supposed accompany an article, which explains what the metric is:

> 1. If you read the original paper[1], they seem to be doing it for weird economics reasons:

You should probably link a reference to the required extra information if you are expecting people to believe your sourced data instead of assuming they already know it.

> I don't know enough about economics to dispute this…

> In other words, not enough to change the conclusion.

If you don’t know enough about economics to dispute this, why would anyone trust your conclusion?

You’ve not changed my mind, only solidified that this is misleading data given your follow up.

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