It's beginning to look like a tax increase on the wealthiest 3% of Americans will be a part of what will fund the increased healthcare benefits for the millions of Americans who have no such coverage.

Of course, there has been a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of increased taxes on any segment of the population. But before everyone gets too upset over how bad it's going to be, it might be instructive to look at how the wealthiest have benefitted from significant tax reductions over the last 25 years or so. Here's a chart of the marginal tax rates for the top income class since 1980.



As can be seen, even with the Bush tax cuts being allowed to expire plus the new, proposed surtax to pay for healthcare, the rich are still doing pretty doggone well. Even with the increased taxes, their marginal rate for 2011 income will be a full 25% lower than it was in 1980 and substantially lower than the years when the highest marginal rates were applied to the highest-income class (94% in 1944-45 and 91% for an entire decade in the late 1950's and early 1960's).

Now, how do we begin paying off the national debt? Without doing a whole lot of calculations, it looks like the national debt could be paid off pretty quickly with more tax increases, but not producing a top marginal rate even close to what it was as recently as in 1980-81. The better alternative is reduced government spending, of course. But we all know what the chances of that happening is, regardless of what party controls Congress and the White House.