Davos Man

by Peter S. Goodman

Not content to exaggerate his altruism, Dell indulged a corollary of the Cosmic Lie: he was against taxes reaching 70 percent not because he preferred to keep his money but out of social concern. “I don’t think it would help the growth of the U.S. economy,” Dell said. “Name a country where that’s worked. Ever.” This was clearly intended as a rhetorical question, but the panelist seated to his left, the economist Erik Brynjolffson, immediately blurted out an answer. “The United States,” he said. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the tax rate averaged about 70 percent. At times, it was up as high as 95 percent. And those were actually pretty good years for growth.”