[ Congress hiked the nation’s top-bracket tax rate to around 90%
for two decades to see the emergence in the United States of the
world’s first mass middle class.]
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TAX THE WEALTHY 75% AND DO IT NOW  
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Sam Pizzigati
January 24, 2023
LA Progressive
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_ Congress hiked the nation’s top-bracket tax rate to around 90%
for two decades to see the emergence in the United States of the
world’s first mass middle class. _

, Illustration by Tom Janssen on Cagle Cartoons

 

Every January, the deep pockets
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our world who see themselves as deep thinkers gather high up in the
Alps to contemplate the world’s most pressing problems at the annual
Davos World Economic Forum.

Every January, analysts at Oxfam, the global group that champions
economic justice, take this annual Davos moment to report out just how
much our world’s richest contribute to those problems – and just
how many of those problems they outright create.

This year’s Oxfam Davos-time report, _Survival of the Richest: How
we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality_, adds
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this pattern a fascinating new twist. Just what do we have to do, this
Oxfam paper essentially asks, to keep our super-rich from being super?

Central to Oxfam’s answer: a call for a tax rate “of at least 75
percent on all personal income” of those making over $5 million a
year, basically those who sit in our world’s wealthiest 0.1 percent.

The billionaires and their invited guests at Davos will pay this Oxfam
call no mind. The awesomely affluent at Davos and the journalists who
cover their exploits like to see themselves, after all, as practical
souls who seek workable responses to our most troubling ills. They see
calls for a 75 percent top-rate as foolish and totally impractical
prattle. No nation on Earth currently comes anywhere close to taxing
at that rate.

The current top-bracket tax rate in the United States, for instance,
sits at a modest 37 percent, and Americans of much more than ample
means actually end up paying taxes
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not much more than half that rate.

So no need, team Davos would have us believe, to pay Oxfam any heed.
Our tax rates need to be realistic, not ruthless.

Back over a century ago, America’s richest — and the lawmakers in
thrall to them — felt the same exact way. In 1916, war had already
begun in Europe, and “responsible” leaders in Congress all agreed
that the United States needed to be fiscally prepared for whatever way
that war would turn. Prudence demanded, they argued, an increase in
the top rate of the then three-year-old federal income tax from 7 to
15 percent.

That increase would become law in the 1916 Revenue Act, and the
lawmakers responsible for it would be exceedingly proud of their
handiwork. None of them could imagine a tax burden on the rich any
heavier than the 15-percent top rate this new legislation put in
place. Federal tax rates on high incomes, announced Henry Rainey from
Illinois, a future House speaker, had reached their “very highest
notch.”

But then, on April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson raised the
stakes. He asked Congress to join the war effort in Europe and fight
to make the world “safe for democracy.” Meanwhile, only days
before, U.S. progressives­­ had already declared a war of their own.
Against plutocracy.

“We do not believe,” Amos Pinchot, the chair of the newly formed
American Committee on War Finance, would tell reporters, “that any
real patriot wants the poor people of the nation to bear the burden of
the cost of war in addition to the burden of fighting.”

The 1916 tax rate hike to 15 percent, Pinchot and his fellow activists
argued, had merely inconvenienced the rich. To meet the bill for
waging actual war in Europe, inconveniences would no longer suffice.
The nation would either have to directly attack plutocratic power and
tax the rich at significant rates or borrow from the rich, a policy
choice that would likely leave the United States even more
plutocratic.

This stark choice thrilled the respectables in Pinchot’s circles,
figures like E. W. Scripps, the maverick San Diego publisher who had
built up a national newspaper chain and founded the national news
service that would become United Press International. Scripps and
reformers of like mind believed that the war would enable a thrust
against plutocratic fortune that peace would never countenance.

“The country will be the gainer by tapping and reducing the great
fortunes,” as Scripps wrote Pinchot shortly after the American
Committee on War Finance went public.

‘I dread the killing of men. I dread the syphilization of vast
numbers of our men,” Scripps passionately continued, “but I gladly
welcome the financial consequences of war.”

Within weeks after the U.S. entry into Europe’s war, the activist
American Committee on War Finance had assembled a nationwide network
of 2,000 volunteers and circulated thousands upon thousands of flyers
asking Americans to commit themselves “to further the prompt
enactment” of the boldest tax-the-rich proposal any American
political grouping had ever advanced: a “conscription of wealth.”

After paying taxes, the War Finance Committee declared, no American
should be able to retain “an annual net income in excess of
$100,000,” an income limit that should remain in effect “until all
bonds and other obligations issues for war purposes are paid.”

The Committee’s income-cap plan called for a 2 percent “normal”
tax on income over $3,000, with a series of steeply graduated surtax
charges above that, ending with a 98 percent levy on all income over
$150,000. The bottom line: No American, after taxes, would have a
residual income above $100,000, a bit over $2.3 million in today’s
dollars.

“If the government has a right to confiscate one man’s life for
public purposes,” War Finance Committee chair Amos Pinchot
pronounced, “it certainly ought to have the right to confiscate
another man’s wealth for the same purposes.”

By mid-spring 1917, the “conscription of wealth” campaign had
completely redefined the nation’s tax-the-rich frame of reference.
Less than a year before, after the passage of the 1916 Revenue Act, a
top tax rate at 15 percent on the nation’s highest incomes appeared
impressive. Now Americans were buzzing about the prospect of a 100
percent top tax rate.

“It is up to every real American citizen to see to it that the war
is conducted honorably, and not degraded into a golden business
opportunity for a small minority of unpatriotic persons,” Pinchot
would testify before Congress. “Neither the United States nor any
other country can carry on a war which will make the world safe for
democracy and the plutocracy at the same time. If the war is to serve
God, it cannot serve Mammon.”

The World War I tax-the-rich battle would go another year. In 1917,
Congress did up the top tax rate on the nation’s top-bracket income
to 67 percent and also included a 60-percent excess-profits tax on
annual corporate earnings over 33 percent. But progressives kept up
the tax-the-rich pressure.

“We believe that as we have conscripted men, so should wealth be
conscripted by means of a heavy graduated income tax,” resolved the
North Carolina division of the Farmers’ Educational and Co-operative
Union of America in March 1918. “The dollar should not be more
sacred than man.”

Lawmakers would get that message. Later in 1918, they upped the
top-bracket income tax rate up to 77 percent and lowered the threshold
for that top rate from $2 million to $1 million in annual earnings.

None of these tax-the-rich numbers, regrettably, would survive the
years right after the war ended. After the 1918 Russian Revolution,
plutocrats found themselves living in a world with an actual workers
state, a socialist republic. The specter haunting Europe had now
become reality — in the new Russia. If they gave an inch,
America’s plutocrats feared, their fortunes would be no more.

In the 1920s, after an appalling wave of repressive moves against
America’s left and labor activists, these fearful plutocrats would
have their way. By decade’s end, the top federal income-bracket tax
rate had shrunk all the way down to 25 percent.

But the Great Depression and World War II would once again re-energize
America’s tax-the-rich campaigners. During World War II, President
Franklin Roosevelt would become their most fervent champion. Four
months after Pearl Harbor, FDR echoed the World War I-era activist
demand for a 100 percent top tax rate.

“In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income
should go to win the war,” FDR told the nation, “no American
citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of
more than $25,000 a year,” the equivalent of just under $500,000
today.

Congress would eventually hike the nation’s top-bracket tax rate to
94 percent in 1944, and that top rate would hover around 90 percent
for the next two decades, years that would see the emergence in the
United States of the world’s first mass middle class.

The new Oxfam tax proposals build on this tax-the-rich history. May
they meet with more lasting success.

_This article was produced by Common Dreams
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_SAM PIZZIGATI [[link removed]],
veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate
fellow, edits Inequality.org [[link removed]]. His recent
books include: The Case for a Maximum Wage
[[link removed]] (2018) and The Rich
Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created
the American Middle Class, 1900-1970
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* wealth inequality
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* wealth tax
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* tax avoidance
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* US middle class
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