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There's a lot of revisionist history surrounding Ike. The 91% top marginal tax meme is misleading. Whether from disingenuousness or stupidity, who knows, but all the same it's misleading. It doesn't really matter what the nominal tax rates are. What matters are effective rates--the rates actually paid after deductions, loopholes shelters, etc.
This is from Piketty and Saez, left-leaning economists who have done a lot in the area of progressivity.
Quote:
Originally Posted by piketty&saez
Interestingly, the larger progressivity in 1960 is not mainly due to the individual
income tax. The average individual income tax rate in 1960 reached an average
[effective] rate of 31 percent at the very top, only slightly above the 25 percent average rate at
the very top in 2004. Within the 1960 version of the individual income tax, lower
rates on realized capital gains, as well as deductions for interest payments and
charitable contributions, reduced dramatically what otherwise looked like an extremely
progressive tax schedule, with a top marginal tax rate on individual income
of 91 percent.
Another bogus meme surrounding Ike was that he was not a conservative. He did campaign as the non-partisan, detached, moderate alternative to Robert Taft, the leading conservative GOP figure in the 1950's. However Ike was very sly, cunning, and Machiavellian. According to his VP Nixon, Ike was:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nixon
the most devious man I ever came across in politics...he [Ike] always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem, and he usually preferred the indirect approach
He [Ike] loathed the idea of a welfare state. He was in fact deeply conservative. He admitted in 1956 that "Taft was really more liberal than me in domestic matters.'"
Another bogus meme surrounding Ike was that he was not a conservative. He did campaign as the non-partisan, detached, moderate alternative to Robert Taft, the leading conservative GOP figure in the 1950's. However Ike was very sly, cunning, and Machiavellian. According to his VP Nixon, Ike was:
Two damned fine posts. Now let me talk to some of the crap from the OP. Eisenhower had voted Democrat all his life and was a registered Democrat and my party of that day, the Democrats, asked him to leave his station in Europe which the Europeans did't like at all, and run for them. He turned them down and later agreed to go with the GOP. I, among most Dems, was mad as hell about that especially since he won so easily.
The OP says that the Korean War was his but he inherited that one from Democrat President Truman. I was always in support of Truman's action in Korea because it was done in support of the Truman Doctrine in which he promised the people of East Asia that he would not allow China, or more realistically, communism, to take them over. When the UN that Truman had worked so hard to create wanted to debate sending troops to Korea, Truman said they can debate for their 2 weeks and in the meantime I will have troops in Korea saving the UN created South Korea from the communist North. Does this sound a bit like what Obama just pulled on the appointment process? Anyway that war was nearly over when Eisenhower took over as the Commander in Chief.
The OP said that Eisenhower pushed for Social Security and I had been paying into that one since 1944. Maybe he supported it but he didn't get it created. Nope it was the Democrat FDR who did that in the mid-30s.
Eisenhower was never a Republican until just before he went with them. However, he did believe in many things that the GOP back then didn't like. I keep telling people that he had a Democrat Congress for his last 6 years and got much more done than most Dems could but he had been one of them all his life. The one thing he did that I have never approved of was to start spending what the Congress called Social Security "surplus" funds to buy some foreign friends.
The 1950s was a good time to be a late teen and an early 20s citizen and I remember so much of all that because I started to college in 1950.
Just as JFK would not be welcome in the Democrat Party.
My second Presidential vote was for JFK and my first one was now embarrassedly for Stephenson because he was a Democrat. I have always been proud of voting for JFK but I agree that he couldn't get the Democrat nomination these days.
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