Plutocracy: If Corporations and the Rich Paid 1960s-Level Taxes, the Debt Would Vanish | | AlterNet

Plutocracy: If Corporations and the Rich Paid 1960s-Level Taxes, the Debt Would Vanish | | AlterNet

Once upon a time in America, back a century ago, our nation's rich paid virtually nothing in taxes to the federal government. And that same federal government did virtually nothing to better the lives of average Americans.

But those average Americans would do battle, over the next half century, to rein in the rich and the corporations that made them ever richer. And that struggle would prove remarkably successful. By the 1950s, America's rich and the corporations they ran were paying significant chunks of their annual incomes in taxes — and the federal projects and programs these taxes helped finance were actually improving average American lives.