Lower top tax rates enabled rent extraction

The fall in the top marginal income tax rate from 90% in the 1960s to roughly the mid-20s after the 1986 Tax Reform Act created incentives for top earners to extract very high salaries; because macroeconomic growth was not unusually high since 1980 while top incomes boomed, one reading is that high earners gained at the expense of other stakeholders (shareholders and other workers) rather than by producing proportionally more.