Republicans Versus Reality

Bruce Bartlett (h/t Mark Thoma):

In early 1993, Bill Clinton asked Congress to raise the top statutory tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent, along with other tax increases. Republicans and their allies universally predicted that nothing good would come of it. They even said that it would have no impact on the deficit.
Ronald Reagan himself was enlisted to make the case the day after President Clinton unveiled his program. Writing in The New York Times, the former president said, “Taxes have never succeeded in promoting economic growth. More often than not, they have led to economic downturns.”
Of course, Reagan himself raised taxes 11 times between 1982 and 1988, increasing taxes by $133 billion a year, or 2.6 percent of the gross domestic product, by his last year in office. Presumably he supported these measures because he thought they would raise growth; otherwise he could have vetoed them.

Speaking before the Heritage Foundation’s board on April 16, 1993, former Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, predicted budgetary failure from the Clinton plan. “Will raising taxes reduce the deficit?’ he asked. “No, it will weaken our economy and increase the deficit.”
Conservative economists were often quite specific about exactly what the negative impact of the president’s plan would be. On May 8, The New York Times interviewed several. John Mueller, a Wall Street consultant, said inflation would rise to “at least 5 percent within the next two or three years.”
In fact, the inflation rate did not rise at all until 1996 and then went up to 3.3 percent before falling to 1.7 percent in 1997 and 1.6 percent in 1998.

Then there were the Bush tax cuts.  They may not have created any jobs, but they did manage to keep the government from running too large of a surplus.  Idiots.