[Vision2020] Sixty Years Ago Today (September 23,1952)

[Kenneth Marcy]

On 9/23/2012 8:21 AM, Kris Freitag wrote:
> Actually $18,000 is probably  more than the Koch brothers paid in 
> taxes period.

Just for a little perspective, $18,000 in 1952 dollars inflates to 
$146,192.55 in 2010 dollars. Sixty years ago, the median family income, 
that is, half of families above and half of families below that level, 
was $3,890, so $18,000 in 1952 was quite a bit of money from a personal 
perspective. It's unlikely that more than one percent of families earned 
$18,000 in 1952, so what might appear close to poverty today gave the 
opposite impression then.

Today the Koch brothers, Charles in Wichita, and David in New York, are 
tied at number 4 on the Forbes list of richest Americans with $31 
billion each of personal wealth. [Forbes estimates Kansas-based Koch 
Industries as having $100 billion in revenues and 67,000 employees, 
making it the second-largest privately held company in the country. (The 
largest private company is Cargill, third is Mars, the candy company, 
fourth is PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the business auditors, and fifth is 
Bechtel, the construction company working at Hanford and elsewhere.)]

I don't doubt that the Koch brothers are aggressive arrangers of their 
financial affairs to minimize their taxes, but it seems likely that they 
paid more than $18,000, either together or individually. On the other 
hand, the average effective corporate income tax rate has been declining 
steadily over the last sixty years, to the point that it is about half 
what it was early in the Eisenhower years. The fact of the matter is 
that if Americans were to demand a return to "Checkers-speech era" 
corporate tax rates, the nation would be able to address many of its 
fiscal problems in more straightforward manners.


Ken