Ooh, Don't Look at That

Steve Kornacki posted a really good article on taxes yesterday at Salon.com. He reminds us of the histrionics the Republican Party went through when then-President Bill Clinton promoted a plan "that would raise taxes on the top 1.2 percent of income earners and create a new 39 percent bracket for the wealthiest Americans."

Of course, the GOP said it would dampen job creation, balloon the deficit and send the country hurtling toward a double dip recession. Just like Chicken Little, they spent the better part of the Summer of '93 screaming, "The sky is falling. The sky is falling!"

But an amazing thing happened after Clinton and the Democratic Congress passed this legislation: The sky didn't fall. As Kornacki goes on to point out,

There was no second recession in the next year. The economy didn't slow down. Jobs weren't killed. Revenue didn't shrivel up. What did happen is that the tentative recovery turned into a full-fledged recovery and economic growth eventually exploded. There are all sorts of explanations for the prosperity of the 1990s; at the very least, we can say that Clinton's budget did absolutely nothing to stop this prosperity from taking hold -- even though the GOP insisted that it would make any kind of recovery impossible. What's more, with the higher rates in place thanks to the Clinton budget (and the Bush budget, for that matter), Uncle Sam benefited from an unprecedented infusion of revenue. By 1998, the country was running surpluses and rapidly paying down the debt. When Clinton left office, America was on track to pay off its entire debt. By any measure, the Clinton tax increases had worked -- spectacularly...

So, when you hear the fiscal conservatives tell you all the bad things that will happen if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, please remember that the last time they made these dire prognostications, they were dead wrong. Why should anyone believe them this time around?