Tax Cuts do not worsen the economy, read your history GOP deniers

The modern GOP is acting more and more like a child who will tell a parent "I didn't do it" while wearing muddy shoes and being asked who tracked mud in the house. You have the Birthers, the climate change deniers, but the most dangerous are the tax cut crusaders.

Again and again, when the GOP clamors for control of the deficit, they will simultaneously refuse to consider any tax increases. They claim that increasing taxes in any form will destroy the economy. And again and again they invoke 'Saint Reagan' and say that his tax cuts alone were the cause of the 1980's boom. And they will claim that this mythical figure never ever raised taxes.

Point 1, Reagan did in fact raise taxes, in fact doing so more of his years in office than he did cut taxes:

Here is an article written by a member of Reagan's Treasury department, below are the most startling quotes:

Reagan may have resisted calls for tax increases, but he ultimately supported them. In 1982 alone, he signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year and the Highway Revenue Act raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.



According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.

Another startling point:

According to a table in the 1990 budget, the net effect of all these tax increases was to raise taxes by $164 billion in 1992, or 2.6 percent of GDP. This is equivalent to almost $300 billion in today's economy.

So Reagan did in fact raise taxes (or agreed to do so), even in 1982 when the country was still in the grips of a recession, and amazingly enough the economy did get better! So raising taxes did not cause the Recession to worse, in fact it did the opposite.

Point 2: That the government shrunk under Reagan, only Democrats make the government bigger.

Here I refer to David Stockman, Reagan's Budget Director

The wrong lesson was taken from the 1980s. We didn't cut back government at all; government got bigger. We didn't reduce the tax burden, we just avoided increases. But the conclusion was drawn that there was a great prosperity in the 1980s due to the Reagan tax cut. I don't believe that at all. I believe that the expansion that we had for a few years was due to the fact that Paul Volcker's Fed crushed inflation

Point 3: Tax cuts will inherently damage the productivity and the economy, let's compare the last 3 decades:

 In 2008, Paul Krugman adjusted for both inflation and population growth, to try to figure out the per-capita tax revenue increase for each decade since Reagan, and found something even more enlightening. Real revenues per capita rose 19 percent from 1980-1988. From 1992-2000, real revenues per capita rose 41 percent -- after tax hikes by both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton! And the numbers for George W. Bush? Pure disaster

The facts speak for themselves, tax increases do not worsen the economy, and in fact the 2 times we had increases at the tail end or just after a recession the economy boomed. So while we cannot directly say that the tax increases caused the boom I believe that the historical record proves that a tax increase will definitely not hurt the economy. So do not listen to these GOP deniers, they are tools of the big money corporations and billionaires who just want to avoid paying more taxes.