The Tax Man

Paying your fair share of taxes makes sense because when the ultra rich game the system and don't pay their fair share, the country suffers big time, something in stark comparison to how the country was run back in the day.

This tax-the-rich national mindset was so pervasive that both Democratic and Republican administrations from Roosevelt to Nixon supported enormously high taxes on the wealthy.

For example, during WWII all income over $2.6 million in today's dollars was taxed at a 94% rate. Think about that for a moment. Basically this rate served as a cap on elite compensation. After bankers hit $2.6 million, they received only 6 cents on the next dollar.

In 1956, during the conservative Eisenhower administration, the tax rate was still 91% of all income over $3.4 million. In 1976, 70 cents of every dollar of income over $807,000 went to federal income taxes.

In sum, here was a national consensus that such tax rates were both necessary and proper. For more than a quarter century, we shared an inner sense of justice: To promote the interests of everyone, there should be some limit on what the wealthy could earn.

The current notion that the rich should be able to manipulate the tax codes to pay lower tax rates than the rest of us would have been revolting to previous generations. Not just revolting, but downright stupid. We once understood quite clearly that runaway inequality would surely lead to calamity.

So the question to ask is, what do we do about it given that the nation's going to hell in a hand basket due to not only income inequality but also to the expansion of the military/industrial/congressional complex fueled by fear, debt creation and never ending war instead of creating an intelligent tax system keyed to a graduated flat tax environment that would again create a fundamentally strong and viable economy by reestablishing the same tax percentages applied to the rich as per WWII. Makes sense, don't you think?