[Chemist_Geek]

Perhaps the problem is that in the 50's, despite high marginal tax rates, the government actually took very little of this average guys income. Now, it takes half. Maybe if the government didn't take half of everybody's money, things would return to the way they were.

Don't forget state and local income taxes, and property taxes, and sales or use taxes, and gasoline taxes and...

Is it me, or did Western Civilization reach its zenith in roughly 1957, and has been going downhill since then?

[TomT in NJ]

I would push it back 3 years to 1960, when Kennedy beat Nixon. It's been downhill since that year.

[Aria]

You know, I've been thinking the same thing. I look at my mother who is 79, originally from Minnesota, and think that she has seen the depression, WWII, the 1950s (the Ozzie and Harriet and Lucy years) then then it gradually started to fall apart - Kennedy being shot, Vietnam, drugs, sexual revolution with women demanding that they have the "right" to kill their babies so then can have careers, the rise of the cynical society dictated by lawyers and the media, and now this. The world is exploding. Its impossible to imagine that we will ever get back to the good years. I heard that Australia is like the US was in the 50s. Maybe its time to check it out.