>Twice today on NPR I've heard someone (two different someones, I think)
>coming on to say that:
>1. When taxes were cut under Reagan, tax revenues increased
>2. In every case where taxes were cut, revenues increased
>
>It seems to me that these statements can't be true (unless the numbers are
>jiggered somehow). Are they?
Revenues increased in the sense that nominal dollar receipts were higher in 1983 than 1982, and 1984 than 1983, and so on. But that's almost always the case, because of inflation and general economic growth. Most people who aren't professional apologists for plutocrats measure revenues as a percent of GDP, and there's no ambiguity about what happened in the early Reagan years. Here's the last 20 years of federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
1980 19.0% 1981 19.7% 1982 19.2% 1983 17.6% 1984 17.5% 1985 17.9% 1986 17.6% 1987 18.6% 1988 18.4% 1989 18.5% 1990 18.2% 1991 18.0% 1992 17.8% 1993 17.8% 1994 18.4% 1995 18.8% 1996 19.2% 1997 19.7% 1998 20.5% 1999 20.6% 2000 20.7%
Doug