• AutoTL;DRB
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    49 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Such staggering accumulations of wealth are made possible in large part by the fact that America’s federal tax burden is so comparatively light.

    Now President Biden, behind in many polls and with an economy that is objectively strong but politically unpopular, is hoping to boost his re-election bid with a policy idea that would once have been almost unthinkable: For this portion of the population, at least, he is vowing — almost gleefully — to raise taxes.

    For a Democrat with low job approval ratings and precarious poll numbers on his handling of the economy, it’s a shocking rebuke to conventional wisdom — and practically an invitation to critics to call him a tax-and-spend liberal.

    Howard Jarvis and his followers, mostly older white property owners, pushed for the ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 because they were, in their words, mad as hell that their rising taxes would help educate immigrant families.

    In the 1960s, George Romney, Mitt’s father, regularly turned down his bonuses from his auto executive job, perhaps in part because his marginal tax rate would have been about 90 percent.

    “You could be talking about the Mets versus the Dodgers,” the former U.S. Representative Steve Israel of New York recalled, “and good Republican operatives would be able to weave in tax-and-spend.”


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    • @kablammy@sh.itjust.works
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      29 months ago

      In the 1960s, George Romney, Mitt’s father, regularly turned down his bonuses from his auto executive job, perhaps in part because his marginal tax rate would have been about 90 percent

      If this is true he’s a fucking idiot. 10% of $x is better than $0. More likely the reason was that the bonuses pushed him over some threshold so he lost some other benefit, making it a net loss, or he negotiated some alternative compensation mechanism that had reduced or deferrable tax liability.