Which made the president seem moderate when his 1935 “Soak the Rich Act” raised the tax on income over $2 million to 55 percent. “Political equality,” FDR said in 1936, is “meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” In what he pitched as a Second Bill of Rights, he proposed guaranteeing all Americans “the right to earn enough” for “a decent living” and “a decent home” and to have “adequate medical care” paid for with “a tax [on] all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate.” That was 1944, Peak Leftism for Democrats on economics.
