| Kasz216 said: Which itself is extremely rare. In general, when the rich get richer, the economy expands and everybody does better... and yes this is backed up by evidence and is one of the most basic economic realities. It isn't the other way around, because the rich are getting ricehr BY growing the economy.... they're the ones who are doing it... because they're the only ones equipped for mass wealth creation. I do agree that tax cuts are fairly pointless towards the economy outside of a short term boost. Though tax raises due nothing but cause a short term to medium term slowdown. |
Not rare at all. Let's have a look at a graph of percentage of pre-tax household income in the US received by the top 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01%.
This is from wikipedia, by the way. Now, let's have a look at periods of recession and depression. The Great Depression occured in 1929, when all three measures were at their highest levels prior to the late 1990s. The next recession was 1937 - a local maximum for all three. Both of these events were followed by massive unemployment before the depression/recession ended (25% and 19%, respectively).
Now for some more demonstration. The Great Depression? Let's look at the tax rate in the leadup to that period.
In the leadup to the Great Depression, top tax rates were at very low levels. Between 1936 and 1980, the top tax rate was 70%+. In this same period, economic growth periods were stronger and economic recession periods were gentler, even despite events like World War 2. And while national debt as a percentage of GDP was high due to WWII, as soon as the war ended, national debt plummetted, and continued to drop up until 1980.
You probably don't believe that the economy was strong in the meantime. So let's look at GDP per capita growth (in 2011 dollars) since the great depression.
If one were to plot growth rate relative to current total, the rate would be much higher between 1936 and 1980 than at other times. Still going to argue that increasing tax on the rich tends to kill the economy?
In short, the facts just do not bear out your claims of the economy doing better when the rich do better.
