Don't forget the disaster of LBJ's Great Society programs that led to the hyperinflation of the even more disastrous Carter years.
Your claim makes absolutely no sense. The inflation of the 1970s was not "hyperinflation" by any stretch of the imagination, and there is no mechanism to explain how social programs could cause inflation a decade after the fact. If they caused it at all, it would be nearly instantaneous due to the immediate introduction of money into a consumption-heavy area of the economy. Furthermore, where was all that inflation in the '40s, '50s, and early '60s, when tax rates were two to three times what they are now?
*That* is when Reagan rode to the rescue
Reagan didn't "rescue" anything - he just redistributed money from the public into the private sector, creating a speculative market bubble that nearly destroyed the economy when it burst in 1987. His policies single-handedly made homelessness a major phenomenon in America, created a permanent underclass, and set the stage for the evaporation of the middle-class by undermining basic infrastructure. He basically sold the floor beneath our feet for scrap and told us it was Christmas.
after Obama-Reid-Pelosi, we will need another white knight to get us out of the swamp of Progressivism into which they have driven us.
Tax rates are pretty much the same as they were under Bush, if not lower - even the expiration of Bush's top-rate tax cuts would only increase them by a single-digit percentage. Rates would have to more than double to undo Reagan's tax cuts - our economy is still mired in market fundamentalist dogma.
We've done so well that we now rank as follows:
6th in global innovation-based competitiveness
11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school
16th in college completion rate
22nd in broadband Internet access
24th in life expectancy at birth
27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering
48th in quality of K-12 math and science education
and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.
Yes, but those are facts, and facts have a well-known liberal bias. The picture is much more favorable toward conservative policies if you read pigeon entrails.
Yes, America had sucha great economy back in the day, with the great depression and ww2 and all...yeah...
The Great Depression began under a laissez-faire system characterized by regular cycles of economic castastrophe, and they only stopped when the market became regulated and labor standards were introduced in the Roosevelt and subsequent administrations.
The generation that grew up in the FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations was the first not to experience a major economic depression - growth was so significant and reliable that it became commonplace for Americans to assume that every generation would do better than the last. Republicans were quick to seize on the relatively mild economic troubles 40 years after the Depression, when people's memories of what conservatives had done to America had faded. They've spent the intervening decades slowly murdering the American Dream and replacing it with greed.
We could probably tolerate the loss of government revenue from higher tax rates
The Laffer Curve strikes again! :lamo You're basically claiming that zero taxation would yield infinite revenue.
but the country and all of its citizens become more prosperous when the workers are allowed to keep more of what they earn.
No. There are optimal tax rates, because there are such things as public goods that benefit the economy more than cutting taxes - things like education, roads, public transportation, communications, labor and environmental enforcement, etc. You have no evidence that optimal tax rates are beneath current levels, and the entire point of this thread is that America's "Golden Age" - when its modern culture was formed and its potential seemed boundless - was characterized by much higher rates than we have at present. If you're just against taxation, then your position is not rational or empirically justified.
Kennedy, Reagan and Bush understood that
Kennedy understood that the optimal top rate would be 70%, and even that level was accompanied by Keynesian deficit spending on infrastructure. Ronald Reagan didn't understand anything, he was just an ideologue opposed to progressive taxation who got whatever cuts he could while eviscerating the public sector.
but Obama doesn't even seem to know anyone who understands it.
You certainly don't seem to know anything about President Obama's policies.
So the underlying text here is, "Socialism is good"
You tell me - what is the "underlying text" of the fact that the most prosperous economy in the history of the world, that saw the advent of the modern American middle-class, corresponded to 70-90% marginal income tax rates on the wealthy for nearly half a century?
because Americans are so bad at doing things now.
Americans aren't the problem - it's people in this country who consider themselves above America; people whose only accomplishment was to inherit opportunities they want to deny everyone else; people who are heroes in their own minds for having money; who think paying taxes is beneath their royal dignity; and who believe everyone else should just be grateful to stand in their immaculate presence. Personally, I think they should do their part or get out.
Look at all the socialist country's and how well they are "ranking" (and I never believe the ranking bs - its like lying with statistics)
And that's how conservatives think - say the sky is green, then accuse your window of lying because it shows blue. Nothing new. Orwell identified it as "doublethink."
I didn't realize the U.S. fights wars for free.
That's the point - nothing is free. You can't just keep cutting how much you give to your country and expect to
have a country.
You cannot simply determine the state of an economy based on how much America's highest earners are taxed.
I'm not
defining an economy by tax rates (unlike conservatives, who do so constantly in the other direction) - I'm
correlating high tax rates with the most prosperous economy in the history of the world, which is hard to dismiss given that it was spread over half a century.
I need to see tax rates for all income brackets, capital gains taxes, taxes on businesses, excise taxes, etc.
Fair enough, but does that mean you concede that a MUCH higher top marginal income tax rate can correspond to optimum economic conditions?
Lastly, how exactly did income taxes on the wealthy create vaccines, internet, etc?
Public grants, public universities, federal research programs, etc. All of which falls under the aegis of "infrastructure."
Polio's funding came from the March of Dimes (public donations), Universities, and research grants from the likes of Rockefeller and others.
You mean people gave their money to help out folks too lazy to defeat polio themselves?
Let's not confuse the highest marginal rate and its impact with the overall effective rate. It is one thing to have the highest marginal rate at 90% when the brackets are structured so that only, say, 1/4 of 1% of taxpayers are in that bracket. It is quite another to have the highest marginal rate at 35% or 39.5% when the brackets are structured so that, say, 50% or more of taxpayers are in that bracket.
That is a nuance worth considering, but is it the case that the brackets were structured in that way?
After all, if the next $1,000,000 I earn is going to yield only $100,000 to me in after-tax income, what is the point? Is the extra effort really worth it?
That sort of begs the question - I don't see much reason to believe that making more money at that level necessarily involves more effort, or that it adds more to the economy than it takes away by concentrating it in one person's holdings. At some point it's not even physically possible to work harder, and the extra money one makes is just economic inertia and luck - not exactly sacrosanct market forces.
Once someone no longer has to work anymore, can do whatever they want whenever they want, and can afford pretty much anything, what does it serve other than their ego and fanatical anti-government ideology to not assert public prerogatives more strongly? Chances are, the money is not going back in the economy: It will either be put into assets or invested speculatively to drive bubbles that ultimately deprive the economy of that value. We've now seen this happen multiple times: Reagan's policies are a failure and the claims behind them have been discredited several times over.
The society of the 1950s was an unsustainable society, and we are reaping the fruit of that time period now.
No, it wasn't - the expenses incurred during those decades were largely paid as they went. It wasn't until the Reagan administration that the National Debt exploded. Perhaps we could survive on tax rates that low if we let go of our military-industrial complex, but otherwise you either have to raise taxes back to sustainable levels or dissolve the United States of America (an option some Republicans already seem to have a fancy for, since they've decided paying taxes is some sort of sin).
That right-wing rhetoric about "socialism" is ignorant and insane.