All in the family

Abraham Lincoln’s wartime taxes included a tax on dividend income.  Theodore Roosevelt sought a progressive tax on inherited fortunes.  Dwight Eisenhower supported taxing excess wartime profits.  Richard Nixon raised the upper end of the tax rate tables for unearned income.  In 1986, Ronald Reagan made certain that the top rate for stock market income was the same as that for earned income, eliminating the preference for capital gains. 

Only two Presidents have called for drastic cuts and/or elimination of taxes on investments—capital gains and dividends—for individual taxpayers.  Both of them are named Bush.

I learned this, and much more, in this Kevin Phillips commentary, seen in Sunday’s Seattle Times.  I’ve been meaning to pick up a copy of Phillips’s most recent book, Wealth and Democracy:  A Political History of the American Rich (almost put it in my basket yesterday during the couple of hours I spent yesterday at Powell’s City of Books in Portland), and this article may be the spur I needed to finally make the buy.  Phillips notes that the Bush family has made its money in the investments business for nigh onto a century.  Dubya’s great-grandfather, grandfather, at least three of his uncles, and two of his brothers have controlled and/or done their life’s work for investment firms.  Even Dubya’s and Poppy’s oil companies were much more about tax shelters and investment-based tax dodges than about producing petroleum.

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