A Short History of Modern Taxation in 4 Acts

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/a-short-history-of-modern-taxation-in-4-acts/256244/

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The last 30 years are often taken as one great experiment in tax cuts and bulging income inequality. In fact, the real story is much more spiky.

There are many ways to take stock of the tax code. I'm going to introduce one that's new to me. It comes a very useful brief on the federal tax code by Michael Linden, an economist with the left-leaning Center for American Progress. This graph measures how much federal taxes reduce income inequality.

There are three acts in this play. In Act I, Reagan's big cut took a load off the rich. In Act II, the tax code regained some progressiveness between Reagan's tax reform of 1986 and Clinton's tax hike in 1993. In Act III, effective tax rates for the rich re-started their downward march.