Although every year April brings the start of baseball season and tax season, this year the two events seem more commingled than coincidental. In New York, two new taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are opening. One, the home of the New York Mets, is Citi Field, Citicorp having bought the naming rights back before the crash, when its stock prices were in the fifties and no one ever imagined that one day taxpaying fans of the Cubs and the Dodgers and other National League teams would send a portion of those dollars to Washington, which would then TARP it over to Citi, which would transfer it to the Mets, who would then use it to sign free agents like Frankie Rodriguez, who would then do his best to defeat those Cubs and Dodgers and other National League teams.
Meanwhile, in the Bronx, home of the celebrated New York Yankees, the new Yankee Stadium is opening, and the big news there is that for the first time in about a decade, seats are still available: fans are balking at the idea of paying $1000 a seat (admittedly, very good seats) to watch the Yankees, a splendid team, but one, let’s face it, that has not won a World Series since the turn of the millennium, and which last year did not even qualify for the post season playoffs. The most expensive seats in the house, the premium Legends Suite seats that are located on the field level behind the dugouts and home plate, go for $2,650 each. That means it would cost a family of four $10,600 for a night at the ballpark, and that’s before peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Of course, the ordinary family of four—my family of four, for example–doesn’t sit in those seats. My family of four watches the games on TV. Those seats are for the very rich. But even those seats are tax-supported, by people like me.
This happens in one of two ways. Many of those seats are bought by corporations, who then distribute the tickets as rewards to top executives for personal use, or who 
use them to entertain clients and business associates. The corporation then deducts the cost of those tickets as a business expense, whether it had any bearing on business or not. It’s a splendid perk; no wonder that when the legendary Jack Welch left GE, his severance package included lifetime season tickets to both the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. No doubt the shareholders of GE, a company which lost its AAA rating the other week, are delighted to keep sending the fabulously wealthy Welch to the ballgame, long after he stopped earning his keep.
The other, less obvious way these seats are supported are through low tax rates. Apart from a few heirs and heiresses and film stars, the only people who could afford Legends Suite seats are the masters of Wall Street, the investment bankers and hedge fund operators who year after year pulled down eight figure incomes. One reason they can toss money around is relatively low tax rates. There was a time in the United States when people who earned such vast sums surrendered a big portion over to the tax man. In 1935, for example, the top rate was set at 79 percent; it applied to people who had incomes over $5 million (worth about $75 million today), which in practice, meant that it affected only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller. From the forties through the sixties, the top rate hovered around 90 percent; it kicked in at an income of $400,000, which is worth about $3 million now. That doesn’t seem like much, but in those days pro athletes and movie stars were living lavishly on five-figure incomes.
Today’s top rate is 35 percent, and kicks in at a relatively modest $357,700, the amount a hard-working surgeon or attorney or president of the United States ($400,000) might earn, people who might be able to afford $2650 for a very special night out, but who would probably be sorely disappointed to have spent $2650 to have seen the 15-5 drubbing the Yankees suffered last night, but which mercifully occurred in Tampa. The relatively low tax rates applied to the incomes of, say, credit default swappers (the pirates of New York harbor who have been vilified but not yet shot by Navy SEALS) allow them buy baubles like Legends Suite seats with a wave of their platinum cards.
No doubt those days are coming to a close. The Obama administration is going to have to start raising money somewhere, and a good start will be the cuurently friendless rich. They will squeal and start backing Republican candidates who have no agenda beyond lowering income taxes that have not seen an increase in sixteen years, and complain that high marginal tax rates discourage people from working hard to earn more money. It’s just not true.