President Joe Biden has made no secret of his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s even given a painted portrait of FDR a place of honor in his White House Oval Office. A bit more significantly, Biden has just announced the most ambitious gameplan — since FDR’s New Deal — for enhancing the well-being of working Americans and trimming the incomes of America’s super rich.

Has Biden, with this gameplan, definitively reached FDR-like levels on the political daring meter? Has his administration now earned something close to Rooseveltian stature? That all depends — on how we answer just one more question: Just how bold does Biden’s new tax-the-rich plan actually happen to be?

This observer’s answer: Much bolder than the numbers — at first glance — might seem to suggest.

Let’s start by going back to FDR’s last year in office, the 12 months before he passed in 1945. At that point in time, the nation’s most awesomely affluent faced a 94 percent tax on their ordinary income over $200,000, earnings that would equal a little more than $2.9 million in today’s dollars.

Tax brackets below that $200,000 back then also carried stiff rates. One example: Affluents in FDR’s last year paid a 78 percent tax on income between $50,000 and $60,000, the equivalent of between $736,000 and $883,000 today, and every income bracket between $60,000 and $200,000 sported a progressively higher tax rate.

The tax rates the Biden administration has just proposed come nowhere near those 90-plus or even 70-plus Rooseveltian rates. If Congress goes along with the Biden plan, any personal income over $400,000 from employment or the ownership of a business will just face a 39.6 percent tax, a rate only up slightly from the current 37 percent.

But what seems a huge gap between New Deal-era tax rates on high incomes and what the Biden administration is proposing starts shrinking big-time when we toss capital gains — the dollars the rich make buying and selling stocks and bonds, property, and other assets — into the picture.

In 1945, at the end of the Roosevelt administration, the nation’s deepest pockets paid a 25 percent tax on their capital gain windfalls. Today’s really rich currently face a capital gains tax that tops off at 20 percent. For households making over $1 million in annual income, the Biden plan would raise the top capital gains tax rate to 39.6 percent, the same top rate that applies to earnings from employment.

In other words, the new Biden tax plans ends the most basic of our tax code’s breaks for the ultra rich: the preferential treatment they get on the income from their wheeling and dealing. And the ending of this preferential treatment would be a big deal indeed. In 2019, 75 percent of the benefits gushing in from the capital gains tax break went to America’s top 1 percent.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.