During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, from 1953 to 1961, the top income bracket in the United States climbed to a marginal tax rate of 91 percent. Taxes on corporate profits were two times as great as they are in 2017, and that’s before the current proposal to cut that rate to 21 percent. The tax on large estates rose to more than 70 percent. Businesses operated under a relatively high tax burden, and they employed a labor force in which one-third of the workers were unionized and bargained with executives as equals. Corporations served a diversity of stakeholders as opposed to stockholders. The result was a booming economy that benefited most Americans.
In 1955, Fortune magazine noted approvingly that the incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by 75 percent. In the 1950s, the average corporate CEO received 20 times more compensation than the firm’s typical employee; by 2016, CEOs’ salaries averaged more than 200 times those of the average worker.