Honestly the biggest difference with the 90% marginal rate is that the reputation of your company used to be more valuable than cash.

Back then to avoid the top bracket, you'd reinvest into your company and make sure it paid you and your family out for the next hundred years.

Now you don't have to deal with all that. Just sell out or cash out asap, and you don't really need to deal with making sure the company is well run or maintains a reputation.

In fact, a reputation since the 1980s has increasingly just been an untapped source of cash. Buy the company, cut every corner, and it'll take years for the reputation to catch up to how shit the product has become.

This has been the biggest driver of enshittification over the past fifty years.

The current added push to enshittification is venture capital drying up. Consider Uber, a company whose entire business model was to skim money off of drivers who provided all of their own equipment. Once you've scaled enough to dwarf the relatively fixed cost of building the app, nearly everything they bring in should be pure profit. But they ran at a huge loss every year. Why? Because the way to make money in the 2010s wasn't to build a better mousetrap and sell it for profit. The way to make money in the 2010s was to attract venture capital and cash out. The more you could spend, the more attractive you'd look to hedge funds and investors.

Now with relatively easy 6% investments lying around left and right, the desperate search for investment dumps is gone. All these places that were structured for big numbers to get a higher valuation suddenly need to just be profitable off their mousetraps.

Does that make sense?