Reagan Revolution Home to Roost--in Charts (hat tip, fellow ABers)
These charts that suggest that everything that is bad today started getting much worse around 1981 when the free marketarian deregulate-militarize-privatize- taxcut approach of the Reagan administration took hold.
If you have any doubts about corporate anarchy or about how well the "free market" greed creed of big corporations serves the interest of we the people, go back to the BP oil spill and look at the relative unimportance of preventing harmful spills to all of the major oil companies as revealed in their testimony at a Congressional hearing and in their cheap, copy-cat "plans" for dealing with big spills. Washington Post, Lawmakers attack plans oil companies had in place for dealing with spills.
Jeffrey Cooper, Ghosts of 1932: The Lost History of Estate and Gift Taxation, 9 Fla. Tax Rev. 877 (2010) (downloadable from SSRN) (hat tip: Tax Prof)
This paper is worth reading, especially for those who think that current progressive discussion of the importance of an estate tax as a backstop to undue concentration of wealth is some new fangled idea that needs to be squelched before it can take hold. Fact is, the estate tax enacted in 1916 was intended for two purposes: to raise revenues and to limit wealth concentration.
Here's a quote from the beginning of the paper:
"[The estate tax enacted in 1916] became a core element of the nation‟s increasingly progressive tax system, an agent of social change embracing the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie and designed to help reverse the inequitable division of wealth resulting from the Gilded Age." [citations omitted]
Recent Comments