I am Kyle's self-indulgence

The most liberal member of the Senate.
The most liberal person to ever run for president.

Conservatives love to roll out the superlatives when discussing Democratic candidates. I have also heard the absolute claims that no president has ever raised taxes during a war or during a time of economic crisis.

When I was commenting on my conservative friend* Melanie's post the other day I decided to do a little fact-checking on myself and found a table of tax rates going back to 1913. Here are the tax rates that the wealthiest Americans were required to pay during a few key years:

1929 (the year the stock market crashed): 24%
1932-1935 (during the Great Depression): 63%
1941 (the year America entered WWII): 81%
1944-1945 (the end of WWII): 94%
1952-1953 (post-war economic prosperity): 92%
1982-1986 (Reagan administration): 50%

Some of these figures may be a little surprising. I still have a hard time believing that there was a 94% tax rate on the wealthiest Americans during wartime. Surely anybody alive today would call that the worst kind of Socialism.

I'm also surprised to see how high the top tax rate was during most of Reagan's presidency. It wasn't until 1987, the very end of his time in office, that taxes were lowered to a rate more comparable to what it is now.

So what can we take away from this? For one thing, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man your grandma voted for in four different elections, was ten times the Socialist that Barack Obama will ever be.

Second, if somebody were to actually attempt the largest tax increase in history they would have to contend with that 38% hike from 1931 to 1932.

Third, the period of history that had the highest tax rates on the wealthy coincided with a time of such tremendous economic prosperity that it is considered a golden era of American capitalism. So much for taxes on the wealthy suppressing growth.

Barack Obama wants to raise the top tax rate back to 39.6% (what it was in 2000) and cut taxes on everyone making less than $250,000 per year. What exactly is so frightening about that?

* P.S. I call Melanie my conservative friend not because she is the only conservative I know, but because she is one of the most thoughtful and well-informed conservatives I know, and that she is very good at challenging all of my views on the issues.