I am a huge fan of high taxes (for the rich), and a common argument I hear against it is “If taxes are too high, nobody will open businesses! Why should someone do a bunch of work if they can’t reap the rewards?”. And I guess it sounds right intuitively, but it’s also factually dead wrong. Tons of companies got started when tax rates were way higher than they are today. In this blog post I’ll combine some data from various sources into a big table which shows the highest marginal tax rates when various companies got started.
In this post I’ll use personal income tax rates, not corporate tax rates. I’m doing this because the usual argument against high taxes is that Sam Walton (or whoever) wouldn’t have started his business if he thought it couldn’t make him personally rich. Nobody starts a business so that their corporate entity can get rich while they personally don’t get rich. So personal income tax rates make sense for this context, and I’ll pull them from here. I’ll show data starting in the 1930’s (when FDR raised taxes as part of the New Deal) and ending in 1986 (after 1986 Reagan lowered taxes to rates similar to what we have today).
The founding dates from companies will mostly come from Wikipedia. And whereever possible I’ll try to highlight companies that conservatives love, because that will make them more big mad.
Anyway, here’s a bunch of companies which were started when, according to the conservative argument, nobody would ever start companies: