Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1950s? | International Liberty

Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1950s? | International Liberty:
Prosperity and Taxation: What Can We Learn from the 1950s?
In my decades of trying to educate policy makers about the downsides of class-warfare tax policy, I periodically get hit with the argument that high tax rates don’t matter since America enjoyed a golden period of prosperity in the 1950s and early 1960s when the top tax rate was more than 90 percent.

Here’s an example from Politico of what I’m talking about.

Well into the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90%. …both real GDP and real per capita GDP were growing more than twice as fast in the 1950s as in the 2000s.

This comparison grates on me in part because both Bush and Obama imposed bad policy, so it’s no surprise that the economy did not grow very fast when they were in office.

But I also don’t like the comparison because the 1950s were not a halcyon era, as Brian Domitrovic explains.

…you may be thinking, “But wait a minute. The 1950s, that was the greatest economic era ever. That’s when everybody had a job. Those jobs were for life. People got to live in suburbia and go on vacation and do all sorts of amazing things. It was post-war prosperity, right?” Actually, all of these things are myths. In the 1950s, the United States suffered four recessions. There was one in 1949, 1953, 1957, 1960 — four recessions in 11 years. The rate of structural unemployment kept going up, all the way up to 8% in the severe recession of 1957-58. …there wasn’t significant economic growth in the 1950s. It only averaged 2.5 percent during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For today’s purposes, though, I want to focus solely on tax policy. And my leftist friends are correct that the United States had a punitive top tax rate in the 1950s.

This chart from the Politico story shows the top tax rate beginning on that dark day in 1913 when the income tax was adopted. It started very low, then jumped dramatically during the horrible presidency of Woodrow Wilson, followed by a big reduction during the wonderful presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Then it jumped again during the awful presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. The rate stayed high in the 1950s before the Kennedy tax cuts and Reagan tax cuts, which were followed by some less dramatic changes under George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

What do we know about the impact of the high tax rates put in place by Hoover and Roosevelt? We know the 1930s were an awful period for the economy, we know the 1940s were dominated by World War II, and we know the 1950s was a period of tepid growth.

But we also know that high tax rates don’t result in high revenues..."

Read on!