Compare And Contrast

Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest describes his success in writing for television in the late 1950s—and entry to the top tax bracket—

The confiscation of one's hard-earned money did not drive me into the right wing, as it did Ronald Reagan, who was as indignant as I but chose to blame it all on a vague nemesis called "big government." I started to turn left. If the government was going to take so much of our money, then let the government give us health care,education, and all those other things first-world countries provide their taxpayers... My real political education began when I made money only to have it confiscated by a military machine. As the age of McCarthy dawned, I would soon be taking a crash course in "radical" politics.

William Kleinknecht's The Man Who Sold the World notes how "Reagan was candid in his memoirs about having had a gripe against government tax collectors"—a "gripe" originating in his post-war Hollywood career, when the country's highest earners were taxed to pay war debt.

As president of the Screen Actor's Guild, Reagan's

...frustration prompted him... to propose that Congress approve a "human depreciation allowance" for actors and athletes, since their earning power had a short shelf life, but the proposal went nowhere…David Stockman, the budget director in his first term, remembers Reagan saying that taxes had been so onerous in his Hollywood days that actors could afford to make only four movies a year before they crept into a punitive tax bracket. "So we all quit working after four pictures and went off the country," Reagan told him...

Of the same period—and SAG president Reagan's conflict-of-interest deal with his own agency, MCA—Kleinknecht adds, "It is not going too far out on a limb to suppose that his later experience with the Justice Department antitrust lawyers... only deepened his enmity toward government."

With Reagan finally in a position to do something about his combined hatred of government and taxes (on the rich, anyway), by early 1982 there was this, cited by Paul Slansky:

2/27 The Congressional Budget Office finds that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average of $240 from last year's tax cuts, while those earning over $80,000 gained an average of $15,130.

During the 80s Reagan would slash taxes for the richest—while raising payroll taxes for average workers, and taxing unemployment checks.

But, no problem with the latter two: those affected no one who mattered.