I agree, but dear old departed dad (a FDR disciple) would argue that confiscatory estate and income taxes helped curtail the development of an "elite" class of American citizens and helped to minimize income inequality which he felt led to civil strife. Of course his thought process developed during the depression and while attached to the British army in India during part of WW2. The poverty in in what is now Bangladesh shook his values.
Without a death tax you end up with a hereditary elite; even if you just consider it an income tax on the recipients, I have no issue with preventing that system from forming.
Want to curtail the elites? Don’t tax people trying to accumulate wealth (as Kennedy tried) and encourage the rich to have large, well educated and industrious families rather than small, entitled folks who mainly know how to make money with money (if they even know that) rather than by growing, moving, making or inventing stuff themselves.
The elites won’t be as elite with more folks moving in.
But if you want to protect the elite families of the early 20th century into future centuries you imposes steep taxes on those trying to build wealth, confiscate it from the merely well of and rich when they die, but allow great fortunes to be shielded though still controlled by the children of the old elites. Make everything about banks, bankers and lawyers to the extent that it is possible too.
Tax the becoming-rich to preserve the elites.
High income taxes FOSTER the elite, because they prevent NEW fortunes.
The thought process long preceded the Depression and came from the 19th Century, from the intellectual roots of so-called “progressivism” or socialism. It took decades for the progressives to sell the idea. The Depression simply was them stepping up to sell the stupid that had been previously better resisted.
Even then they pitched these things as only applying to the ultra-rich ... whom they always them (”they” also being “them”) would be protected. The intent, as with income taxes billed the same way, was to get them in and then expand them down. Incrementalism, just like with all leftist and those opposed to Liberty.
I would also point out that Social Security was ALSO just about funding the government, no matter what FDR etc claimed. They ALWAYS turned the money left over to Congress to spend. The “savings” were in the form of “bonds” where the same entity both owned the bond and owed the debt, which is an absurdity. They were always from the beginnings unsecured promissory debts.
I like to think of it this way: have your right hand write out a promise to repay to your left hand and then take that promise to repay in your left hand to a bank and claim it is an asset to be used for collateral. If you do so, barring the possibility that you’ve just found the dumbest bank officer in the country, they will be laughing their asses off while they are likely calling the Feds on you for securities fraud.
As for what LBJ started spending, and which ran dry early in Reagan’s tenure, that could have only been the reputed value on the books on the one set of ledgers completely ignoring that said “assets” were entirely offset by the matching obligations (plus “interest”). Poetically: they found a way to spend the same money TWICE. Realistically: they were printing money outta nothing on the sly, unreported and without official congressional approval to print it.
It may not entirely be a coincidence that accelerated inflation started spiking after this inflating of the money supply started, went down after it ran out, and hasn’t returned to that extent since.
In short: “progressivism” is founded on lies, abuses and fraud ... no wonder it has gone and keeps going from bad to worse ... till there is now nothing of the old extreme left that is extreme to the left anymore.
Even national destruction (rejecting sovereignty) perversions and insanity are now openly celebrated by the powers that be on the left.