This Week in the Mercury
Monday, March 26, 2012
$$$ "Mad Men" and Taxes
Posted by BRENDAN KILEY on Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 9:14 AM
Good morning! On the occasion of the new season of Mad Men, the New York Times would like to remind you:
In a certain sense, wealthy people could live with a justifiable guiltlessness in “Mad Men” New York. Not because they were blind to the city’s mounting racial crisis or to the perils of smoking or sexism, but rather because, fiscally speaking, they were paying their due. In 1966, which is where the new season finds us, the federal income tax topped out at 70 percent on income over $100,000 (approximately $700,000 in present-day dollars), a figure reduced from 90 percent in a tax cut enacted two years earlier.
Absent were any obvious incentives for amassing perverse amounts of money (and thus there was more time for the languorous lunch). In April 1968, Fortune magazine published a list of those Americans whose net worth exceeded $100 million; the list ended at 153. Today, those in the highest federal income tax bracket will pay 35 percent.
And some call that 35 percent "socialism." If only conservatives respected America enough to study its history...
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