When people talk about the 40s-50s era of 95% marginal income taxes I don’t know that they appreciate all the easy deductions, all the ways corporations could just bear executive benefits on their books

After Truman then Eisenhower came in and the social democratic New Deal got tempered with the old Rockefeller paternalism Square Deal to make the Fair Deal

You could buy your executives a car! A company car! An executive company car! Corporate penthouses! Vacation homes! As many elite country club memberships as you can count!

(And for retirees too - the “Managerial Revolution” maybe put trained technocrats in controlling place of owners/heirs but it was a quasi-feudal lifetime role

Like public school/Pell Grant/G.I. bill academic tenure was for the intellectual class!

Like how union seniority was doing for the skilled working class

Like how they tried doing the same for the underclass with “New Property” welfare rights before they realized they were over their skis, before stagflation tolled the end of the Golden Age and the coming of neoliberalism)

The open-ended deductions for business entertainment and travel, you could treat your friends to the finest (steak & potatoes & whiskey & martinis) meals in town!

Putting money into circulation, leveraging that Keynesian multiplier!

You could hire them the best call girls! Or purchasers visiting HQ from their small towns! Multiplier!

You could fly them! Across the world! When that meant what orbital travel will in 20 years!

You could give them pensions! And their kids college educations!

You could pay your executives that way 1:1 at no limit, the one thing you couldn’t do, or could only do at 20:1 with 19 to the feds, was give them the ability to further acquire the means of production