system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why were taxes so high for the rich during the 50's when it was such a conservative era?
gpt
While the *nominal* tax rates on the rich were high in the 50s, the *effective* rates and actual *taxes* were not. 

Virtually everything was deductible until the 1970s -- for example, credit card interest was deductible. Corporate and estate taxes were much higher as well, meaning that such deductions could be afforded due to revenues coming from other sources. This allowed for the highly progressive tax rate structure (top rates reached over 90%) but again, due to the accounting with deductibles, the effective rates in the 1950s really weren't substantially different from today, and very few taxpayers ever actually experienced the top rates (unlike today, where many more do as a percentage of all taxpayers.)

Due to the ability to deduct practically everything, the push-back from the wealthy was quite low, since few of them would actually pay the published rate. Most of their focus was on maintaining and expanding the deductibility accounting, since that's where the tax savings came from.