Tax History: Record Largest Peacetime Income Tax Hike

 Americans used to be completely comfortable with making the rich pay high taxes.  in 1944 the top income tax rate was 94% and it mostly remained at 91% for two decades until the (liberal Democrat) Kennedy tax cut of 1964 whereupon it dropped to 70% for the next two decades!  Culture changed. 
Alex Raskolnikov gives another historical example of tax culture in the US:

Alex Raskolnikov: [Conservative Republican] Herbert Hoover presided over the largest tax increase in peace time history of the United States. For top earners the rate went up from 25 percent to 63 percent. But not everyone in top 1 percent was paying 63 percent. In fact after the Hoover tax increase, there was a very wide range in rates between people who just barely made the top 1 percent and people who were like Andrew Mellon, like really, really the richest Americans. The range was from 8 to 63 percent. So people who just made it into the top 1 percent were facing the 8 percent rate -- that was not particularly high. The wealthiest of the wealthy of the wealthy were facing 63 percent. And this is 1931!
Paul Solman: Do you read anything into this? I mean, that perhaps the Great Depression continued for another nine years because rates were jacked up that high?
Alex Raskolnikov: Well, as always my answer is going to be that we're not entirely sure, and it's complicated, and there were many factors going into Depression. Tax policy was only one of them, so it's hard to know. But I would say that this range of rates for top 1 percent from 8 to 63 percent is kind of illuminating about the debates that are going on now. When you think about Warren Buffett, who says that he thinks we should raise taxes to top 400 taxpayers, and the debates in Congress about raising taxes on those with an income over a million dollars, that's about 400,000 to some arguments that the top rate should go up for the top 1 percent, that's over a million taxpayers. To Obama's points that we should let Bush tax cuts expire for people with income of $200,000 that's well below, quite below top 1 percent. That's the kind of differentiation that we don't have now that we used to have and that was very profound when Hoover raised the rates.
In 1944 the average rate paid by the top 1 percent of households was 60 percent -- meaning that these people paid 60 percent of their income in taxes. But that's not all. [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] actually wanted more. So in 1942 he suggested capping incomes at $25,000. Today that would be $350,000. That's a little under where today's top marginal rate starts. And it wasn't kind of a backroom discussion in the White House, he made this suggestion to a Joint Session of Congress in 1942.
Paul Solman: That's literally unimaginable today, right? I mean a totally different ethos.
Alex Raskolnikov: I agree, and that wasn't the only suggestion. At some point FDR considered switching to taxation of gross income. It probably would be unconstitutional, but that was sort of on the table. His Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, proposed capping corporate profits at 6 percent -- meaning taxing away everything above 6 percent. That didn't go through and capping ordinary income didn't go through, but these were the things that were being considered at the time.