🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4qhjth$t1g@mule2.mindspring.com>, davidba@atl.mindspring.com wrote:

  :Compare the total tax percentage you paid of your income in 1950
  :compared to today.  Then who was better off?

What percentage did I pay of my income in 1950?

In 1950, my parents were in diapers. I was not even a glimmer of a dream.
The Soviet Union was our erstwhile ally. No man-made object had ever
orbited the Earth. Communist China was barely an upstart. There were no
interstate highways, and few commercial air flights. The atomic bomb wa
sjust beginnign to be replaced by the hydrogen bomb as the primary object
of popular angst. The average starter home sold for somewhere under
$10,000. Polio and smallpox killed millions of children every year. Cancer
-- any cancer -- was a death sentence. 
Television was a novelty, and my father's family wouldn't have one for a
few years, yet. People got their information from the radio, the
newsreels, and the newspaper, and every ciy of any decent size had a few
competing papers.

In 1950, the world was a very different place. You might as well compare
rates of taxation today to those under the Spanish Inquisition.

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   "We were once so close to heaven, Peter came out and gave us medals 
   declaring us the nicest of the damned."      --They Might Be Giants
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Andy Walton * atticus@mindspring.com * http://www.mindspring.com/~atticus