SHARED SACRIFICE, SHARED GLORY

On Memorial Day, we honor soldiers. Not this year. We will honor, this holiday weekend, an entire generation.

This generation now has its own monument, the new National World War II Memorial. The 16.1 million Americans in uniform who fought—and won—World War II didn’t win the war alone, the new monument’s creators remind us. They had help from the home front. Housewives pounded rivets. Kids collected aluminum. Families went without staples at the dinner table. During World War II, everyone seemed to be making contributions. Everyone, at some level, seemed to be making sacrifices.

Even the rich. All Americans were asked to pay more in taxes during World War II, and the wealthy were asked to pay the most of all, more in taxes than any Americans had ever before paid. In 1943, America’s most affluent households faced a 93 percent tax rate on all their income over $200,000. The next year, 1944, the nation’s top tax rate would rise even higher, to 94 percent on income over $200,000—the highest rate in American history.
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Today, by contrast, we are waging a war amid what have become the least progressive tax years in modern U.S. history. Pulitzer Prize-winning tax analyst David Cay Johnston estimates that our nation’s wealthiest households are now paying federal income taxes at a mere 17.5 percent rate, after exploiting all available loopholes. America’s richest households in 1943, after exploiting all available loopholes, paid nearly 78 percent of their total incomes in federal tax.
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At the new World War II Memorial dedication, the American Battle Monuments Commission will be asking us to celebrate the “high moral purpose and idealism” of an entire generation. We ought to do that honoring not just by cheering, but by remembering. We ought to be remembering just how the “Greatest Generation” became great. Our parents and grandparents shared sacrifice, from the top down. We should, too.

Read the rest of the article here at Tom Paine.