For 50 years, 1930-1980, the highest tax rate for the richest Americans averaged 78 percent; the lowest rate averaged 20 percent. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected president, the U.S. had no foreign debt and held a net of $300 billion in overseas assets, despite the Great Depression, WWII, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, and America’s Road to Prosperity 1950 – 1980. We were the largest creditor nation in history. By 1990, after Reagan’s two terms, he had overseen the highest tax rate reduced to 28 percent, and we owed $3 trillion, history’s greatest debtor nation.
With the help of duplicitous, greed-driven Congressmembers, bought and sold by hyper-wealthy individuals and business interests, the average taxpayer’s debt load has increased constantly (exception: Clinton’s administration). Today the U.S. owes more than $9 trillion overseas, and has a total national debt of $40 trillion. Have massive tax cuts for the wealthy helped bring the U.S. into financial disrepair? Should the wealthy be confronted with higher tax burdens to reimburse the country and the society that provided the opportunities to garner their wealth? Would Elon Musk have done as well in his native South Africa? Or Peter Thiel in his native Germany, or Namibia? Zuckerberg? Bezos? Alice Walton?
We’re not asking them to live like us or to give up their luxuries, just that they plow a bigger piece of their wealth back into the soil from which it came. They’re welcome to take the rest to Mars.
