How the Rich Got Richer, Global Comparisons Edition

Dylan Matthews highlights a fascinating little chart today. Roughly speaking, it plots two things for 18 different countries: (a) how much the rich have gotten richer over the past 50 years, and (b) how much tax rates on the rich have gone down during the same period. Guess what? It turns out that in countries where the rich got the richest, they also enjoyed the biggest tax cuts:

How to interpret this is a difficult question to answer…. Lawrence Lindsey and Martin Feldstein have argued that cuts in rates led to increased economic activity among top earners, leading to more growth and income. That's the conventional supply-side story. But you could also tell a story where lower tax rates increased the after-tax income of the rich, and that in turn increased their political power, which produced still lower rates.

Keep reading:

How the Rich Got Richer, Global Comparisons Edition | Mother Jones.