Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Beware of conservative bullshit -- [...]In 1980, while running for the Republican presidential nomination against Reagan, George H.W. Bush called his competitor’s claim that the country could cut taxes but not add to the national debt “voodoo economics.”

In 1991, Bush, by then president, went along with a Democratic plan to raise the top tax rate for the richest Americans from 28% to 31% to stem the red ink. Though top rates remained far below what they were when Reagan took office, any tax increase was anathema to large swaths of the Republican party. Bush paid the price when he lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.

A tax tug-of-war

After that, every Democratic president tried to increase taxes on the wealthy and every Republican president did the reverse.

In 1993, with his party controlling the House and Senate, Clinton proposed raising taxes to deal with deficits and offset Reagan-era tax cuts, settling on a package that raised the top rate from 31% to 39.6%.

“After 12 years of trickle-down economics where taxes were lowered on the wealthiest Americans … we now have real fairness in the Tax Code,” Clinton said as he signed the bill in August 1993.

Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits condemned the increase and warned that it would hurt the economy. “It will kill jobs, kill businesses and yes, kill even the higher tax revenues that these suicidal tax increasers hope to gain,” said Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican.

Rather than tanking, the economy took off. The seven years that followed represented what was then the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s history. Tax revenues soared, prompting three straight years of budget surpluses under Clinton — the only time that’s happened in the past half century.

The Clinton-era top rate and surpluses didn’t last long. The federal government began running deficits again after President George W. Bush put through two tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.

Repeat link -- https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/taxes/unequal-burden/how-four-decades-of-tax-cuts-fueled-inequality/