After posting my previous chart on taxes and the market, I received several requests for one that shows all the tax brackets. So here it is. Click the small chart for a larger image.

When I was developing this chart, I drafted a version with the major wars highlighted (WW I, WW II, Korean Conflict, Vietnam, Gulf War and the more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

Wars are expensive, and someone has to pay.

But the chart got rather cluttered, and dating the beginnings of the wars was problematical. Initial conflict or American involvement? In the case of Vietnam, what level of involvement? (Apologies to the 40% of my website visitors residing outside the U.S. for this nationalistic focus, but the topic is U.S. taxation).

So I invite you to visualize an overlay of major wars with your own idea of their beginnings and durations. In some cases (WW I and II), the changes in federal taxation match the U.S. involvement in the war. Less immediately intuitive, as I implied in my original commentary, is the inverse correlation between the market and taxes during the Great Depression.

Ultimately this chart reinforces my earlier conclusion about future taxation. With the high cost of the federal government's strategies for solving the current financial crisis and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2010, tax increases are inevitable. The only question is how high will they go and how quickly it will happen.