The tax rates from Eisenhower to Nixon is John Kiriakou’s explanation for two things he treats as the same problem: the size of the federal deficit and the concentration of American wealth.
The argument
Provoked by a viewer’s observation that the wealth gap was at its smallest and the middle class at its strongest in 1973, Kiriakou made two points. The first was a blessing: “God bless Richard Nixon and his economic policy, number one.”[1]
The second was the rate structure. “Starting with Dwight Eisenhower and going through Nixon, tax rates were the highest against the wealthiest people” — “the basic tax rate for the wealthiest people was upwards of 75%, and they could whittle it down from there.” He grants that the same write-offs existed then as now.[1][2]
What changed is the starting point rather than the loopholes: “now they pay almost nothing to begin with and whittle it down from there. And then we can’t understand why our deficits are so enormous and why there’s such a wealth gap. That’s why there’s a wealth gap.”[2]
The wages of the period
Kiriakou anchors the argument in a childhood memory rather than a statistic. “One of my earliest memories — my dad came home one day, I think I was four. My dad came home one day and he said to my mom, ‘Honey, I got a raise.’ And she said, ‘You did?’ And he shows her this letter. And he was making $6,800 a year. And then I remember my mom saying, ‘Just imagine, honey, if you could make 7,000, we’d be on easy street.’”[3][4]