John D. Rockefeller Quotes
Taxation has its limitations as a method of achieving better economic distribution since for this purpose it is essentially remedial. We must also take a positive approach by finding new ways to spread ownership of future capital growth more broadly in our society.
He was referring to the success of the Clinton Administration.
FDR had as usual been attacked by the Chicago Tribune and other conservative newspapers. His assistant Raymond Moley drafted the response.
An income tax had been instituted during the Civil War but had lapsed. Existing taxes were all excise or head taxes—very regressive. Later there was a political movement to bring back the income tax with the intention of taxing all income equally. There was a titanic struggle which culminated in a Constitutional Amendment allowing the income tax. None of the original politicians, for or against, the income tax could never imagine an income tax that would charge lower rates for investment income. That was the entire purpose of the income tax at the beginning—to tax investment (unearned) income. The “capital gains tax” was the creative way of the rich getting back some of what they thought the lost when the income tax was instituted.
In modern America, there are two political views of this notion. The one held by a small majority of the population is Trenchard’s quotation taken literally. Their view is that there if the is no way to maintain liberty if there is too wide a gap between the rich and the rest of the population. The second variant, held by many conservatives limits the equality to equality of opportunity. They are loathe to take any position that says that any gap between the rich and the remainder of the citizens might be too large. They would particularly disagree with the first sentence of another Trenchard quotation, {627024}.
Excesses that CEOs and other corporate executives were getting for remuneration became an issue of political controversy in the beginning of the 2nd Milleneum. However, this quotation shows that this was not a new problem and has been considered for a long time.
At the time of this quotation, the nation had gone through more than 3 decades of enormous increase in prosperity for the wealthy, and modest gains for the highly skilled, technically trained workers. However, correcting for inflation, average salaries did not increase at all. The middle class was particularly hard hit. Only 20 percent of the population benefitted from the growth at all; however, the 1 percent had rarely prospered more. Kenworthy’s principle did not apply for this period of American history.
John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history.
