Chart of the Day: Being Rich in America is a Pretty Good Gig

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This will come as no surprise to any of you at this point — I hope — but it never hurts to see it again. The combination of the 1997 capital gains tax cut, the 2001 Bush tax cut, and the 2003 Bush tax cut has been fantastically beneficial to the richest of the rich in America. Most of us ordinary schlubs have seen our tax rates go down about three percentage points over the past decade or so. The rich have seen them go down about seven percentage points. And the super-duper rich? Their taxes have gone down nearly ten percentage points.

It’s pretty nice having a bought-and-paid-for Congress, isn’t it?

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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