You'll honestly need to provide a bit more insight into what you do think is "reasonable" in this area and why, especially considering the results of the Eisenhower era; the guy was not a working class paragon, as he vetoed or otherwise gutted a lot of other public spending, but even at that he not only expanded Medicare but built the Interstate Highway System, and in the meantime personal income for wage earners increased by 45 percent. Very high taxes on the very highest earnings (to emphasize, not their entire income) of the very richest - who, as you noted, didn't flee the country in droves, since they couldn't as easily expatriate their wealth on paper as they do now - weren't the only thing that enabled these successes, but I'd love to hear anyone argue that they weren't a very important contributor.GaijinPunch wrote:I'm also not against the wealthy paying more tax. It needs to be reasonable though. 95% is not.
And just to make very clear what we're talking about here, even if we somehow managed to replicate the setup of the Eisenhower years (which Bernie himself said wasn't going to happen), as mentioned above only annual income over 2.2 million or so would be taxed at the highest rate: you currently qualify as within the top 1 percent of earners if you take in about 400K as an individual or 570K as a household (as the link notes once you get into net worth instead of earnings things get really interesting, but that's a post for another day). If your household takes in 1 million a year that's enough to put you in the top 0.5 percent. We're talking fractions of fractions when it comes to the people who would fall into the highest bracket - and that's before you get into the fact that income over 150K or so isn't subject to Social Security taxes, or that capital gains are taxed at much lower rates than wages, and on and on it goes.
In the meantime, of course, while we go back and forth about this, our new House majority is introducing legislation that not only guts the IRS but eliminates it altogether...and we already know who benefits most when they can't do their jobs, not to mention who inevitably cleans up under a "flat tax" or "fair tax". So again, what exactly qualifies as "reasonable" on this front in your estimation?