Nei quattro decenni successivi al 1979, le famiglie benestanti statunitensi ma non super-ricche hanno visto i loro redditi al netto delle imposte quasi raddoppiati. Le famiglie dell’1% e i super ricchi dello 0,1% sono andati esponenzialmente meglio.
Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation’s rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies.
Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket. That top rate had been hovering around 90 percent for the previous two decades. In the 1950s, a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made no move to knock it down.
The rich felt those taxes. The high life struggled. Consider what happened to one fabled emblem of that era’s excess, the nation’s first-ever penthouse.
