Indeed in 2007 the chief executives of the Too Big to Fail  Banks made on an average $26 million.

     Joe Nocera , today's Times

And they paid 35% income tax on most of that

             Flavius, dagblog 2 days ago.

Just for fun here's some of the 1960  tax rate brackets They started at

0        to     $4000       20%, Then continued

4000   to       8000       22

8000           12000       26

 to skip up to save space ..........

40000         44000        56

44000         52000        59

52000          64000        62

and finally topping out at

300000         400000      90 and anything over that,91%

And no one needed a CPA because it only took a couple of hours to do the tax return. In part because the taxes were the taxes were the taxes because Congress hadn't created thousands of pages of regulations for the deductions which it creates whenever it hasn't the guts to pay for something it wants done.

If we dusted off IKE's tax code whaddaya think that would do to the deficit, social security, and medicare.? .

Of course realistically we'd first have to adjust these for inflation.Probably multiply all the above by 15. So the lowest bracket would be

0         to           $60000        20 %   (or more likely start at $20,000)

60000                120000  22  

etc     .

And  the  top brackets would be

$4.5million to     $6,000,000    90

          and over that would be  91%

So those bankers 26 million $  Joe Nocera talks about  would have paid 90/ 91% of the final $21.5 million  to Tim Geithner. That would help.

Of course with those tax rates their boards wouldn't have approved a $26 million comp plan in the first place. That'd  help the shareholders.

And cut down the traffic on Nantucket.