Gee how did that one turn out? Oh yeah... surplus.
With Democrats proposing to set the top two income tax rates at 36% and 39.6% respectively, Republican leaders waged a ferocious battle on behalf of the wealthiest American taxpayers. Former House Majority Leader and current Tea Party moneyman Dick Armey warned, "This program will not give you deficit reduction." Ohio's John Kasich cautioned, "It's our bet that this is a job killer." And for his part, 2012 White House hopeful Newt Gingrich promised, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable."
As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2010. At issue was President Bill Clinton's $496 billion program of stimulus and upper income tax increases. And what Republicans then decried as disaster ushered in the longest economic expansion in modern American history, a period which produced 23 million new jobs and a balanced budget.
But that hasn't stopped the GOP brain trust from resurrecting their 1993 predictions of gloom and doom, forecasts which were spectacularly wrong.
Launching his campaign for House Speaker, Minority Leader John Boehner on Tuesday decried President Obama's "job-killing tax hikes" and called the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell told Fox News, "It would be a disaster." On Meet the Press last week, Dick Armey rejected the notion of returning the tax rates for the top 2% of earners back to their Clinton-era levels, mocking Obama's "new cockamamy ideas" and insisting the President "not raise taxes and take away the return on an investment" And as Newt Gingrich predicted in July:
"This economy will sink deeper into recession. There will be higher unemployment. The recovery will be longer."
If this all sounds familiar, it should. After all, as ThinkProgress, Congress Matters and Andrew Tobias all documented, pretty much the same people said pretty much the same thing back in 1993.More at the link...
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/republicans-recycle-1993-talking-points-on-taxes