>In a much smaller way, I'd add my son Glen who started his own engineering business from scratch with non-stop sweat equity, imagination and hustle and is doing well.
>
>So, I am sure that you would have no problem with it if someone (the taxman) decided that your son had more money than he could ever spend and took 80% of it away...

Let's keep in mind that the 80% rate was a marginal rate, applied only on earnings above some threshold. I went digging and found this: http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf. It shows the rates and brackets for each year from 1913 to 2013. This version is not inflation-adjusted, but they also have one that is.

I quickly eyeballed the data. Looks like the highest marginal rates were in 1944 and 1945 (not surprisingly with the country at war--in those days, they believed in raising taxes in wartime). The top bracket was 94% for income over $200,000. The inflation-adjusted version indicates that $200K was something in excess of $2.5M in 2012 dollars.

After the war, the top rate dropped to 91%, went up to 92% for a couple of years and then back to 91% until 1964 when it dropped to 77%. In the same period, the cutoff for the top bracket adjusted to $400,000. Soon after, it settled at 70% for quite a while (with some changes in cutoffs) until Reagan, when it dropped to 50% and then eventually down to 28%.

The top marginal rate in 2013 (and, I think, still) is 39.6% on income over $450K for a couple or $225K for an individual. So high earners today are paying a considerably smaller portion of their income in taxes, and yet still complaining that taxes are too high.

Tamar