Hey, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Even President Eisenhower Was a Tax Dodger and Didn't Have to Pay Taxes at the Then Top Rate of 91%

General Eisenhower

Laura Saunders at The Wall Street Journal explains:

From 1940 through 1980 the top rate for the highest earners never dipped below 70%. During most of the 1950s, when the U.S. economy dominated the world, the top rate was 91%. It kicked in at $400,000 of taxable income, or roughly $3.7 million in today’s dollars...

But make no mistake: Many top earners during the high-rate era, such as politicians Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, entertainer Jack Benny and librettist Alan Jay Lerner, didn’t pay the top rates. In 1952, for example, when the top rate was 92%, the highest-earning 1% of taxpayers had an average rate of 32%, according to Elliot Brownlee, a tax historian and emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower also successfully argued that $635,000 he earned from his 1948 memoir, “Crusade in Europe,” should be treated as a capital gain, saving him as much as $400,000 of tax, says Joseph Thorndike, a historian with Tax Notes magazine...

By 1980, when the top tax rate was 70%, the average rate on the top 1% of earners had dropped to 23%, according to the Tax Policy Center. Since then, it has ranged between about 19% and 25%...

In California, there was a flap over news reports that Gov. Ronald Reagan paid no state taxes and only a few hundred dollars in federal taxes on his 1970 income of $73,000, in part because of write-offs from shelter provided by a ranch and a cattle company.