You are exactly right, too. A while back, something about lifestyles of the wealthy in the gilded age in the USA blipped across the news. I looked up tax rates for then, and right before the Black Friday market crash. With the dismantling of Glass-Stegall and anti-trust/anti-monipoly laws, we're very close to those tax rates. We keep repeating lessons learned and it's very sad. You'd think the ultra-wealthy would remember why there was a middle class, to begin with, but they can't manage to retain even that memory.