The decade the GOP hopes you've forgotten - War Room - Salon.com: If this anti-tax adamance -- and the dire warnings of what life in a post-tax hike America would look like -- sounds familiar, it's for good reason. Republicans issued the exact same warnings the last time a president proposed addressing exploding deficits (in part) through tax increases on the wealthy.
This was back in 1993, when Bill Clinton came to office after a campaign in which the national debt -- which had then just crossed the $4 trillion mark -- played an unusually prominent role.
The Republican reaction was identical to what we are hearing from today's GOP. For months in the spring and summer of 1993, they loudly and relentlessly decried Clinton's effort to enact "the largest tax increase in the history of the world" -- a plan that, they warned, would smother what was then a tentative economic recovery, plunge the economy back into recession, throw millions of Americans out of work, and ultimately result in a far worse deficit problem.
What's fun about looking back at the '93 clips, of course, is that we know how the story ended. 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.