This is definitely a interesting article and guide of old tax-avoidance schemes.<p>When that is said, I whish we stopped using income as the measure of 'rich'. Clearly wealth is a better measure, although it's sometimes hard to get good numbers on it. And today's rich can to a large degree choose their income.
> The short version is that, in the 1970s, tax law was much simpler – there was less tax legislation, and fewer statutory anti-avoidance rules. The courts also had a generally forgiving attitude to tax avoidance.<p>So basically taxing the 1% isn't why everyone could afford college and a house back then. But we are better at closing avoidance loopholes these days. With some very obvious exceptions.
The UK press and associated "think tanks" have been busy writing pieces like this trying desperately to refute Gary Stephenson because they, meaning their wealthy handlers, see him as a threat.<p>Gary specifically does NOT advocate for an income tax. He advocates for a <i>wealth</i> tax. This piece does nothing to refute that. It's knocking down a strawman, i.e. that we should go back to the exact same tax policies of 1950s-70s. Gary has never said that. He simply pointed out that achieving financial security was significantly easier for average folk back then, and clearly the answer lies at least partially in our attitudes towards taxing rich people back then, compared to today.
Talk about missing the point that Gary Stevenson was making. The point he was making was not that the tax policy of the 50s,60s, and 70s meant the rich paid a bigger share of the income tax in aggregate, or that the income tax brought in was a higher percentage of the GDP. The point Gary was making was that inequality (wealth and income, but especially wealth) was much lower back then and has been growing ever since.<p>The data in the article proves Gary's point. Not only is income tax brought in less now, but more taxes are VAT (sales taxes) which are regressive. In other words, the poorer people in society are taking on a bigger share of taxes. They are transferring them from a progressive tax system (income and wealth taxes) to a regressive one (sales taxes and VAT).<p>Talk about missing the whole point of Gary Stevenson's argument. The point was that inequality was less back then and the tax system was one reason why. Now inequality is high and keeps getting higher. So yes, we want to go back to the tax system of the 50s, 60s, and 70s not because of getting extra taxes, but because it slows down and may reverse the rise in inequality.
Eh, I'm pretty sure there's a big framing problem here.<p>1) We should expect that the share of income paid by the top to increase as GDP increases. As GDP / Capita increases the amount of people moving into a higher taxed bracket increases so the overall revenue increases.<p>2) The period with a higher tax rate also has a drastic decrease in Debt to GDP [1]. It seems prudent to cargo-cult your policies after ones that historically worked.<p>3) Instead of taxing the rich, they're borrowing money from the rich which further exacerbates the deficit.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_national_debt#/media/File:UK_debt_as_GDP_percent.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_national_debt#/...</a>