Pence Challenges Americans To ‘Check’ His Facts: Guess What? He’s Got Them Wrong»

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/06/pence-reagan-challenge/

Pence Challenges Americans To ‘Check’ His Facts: Guess What? He’s Got Them Wrong»

Appearing on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this morning, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the third ranking Republican in the House, repeatedly claimed that the solution to the economic crisis was to “do what Ronald Reagan did” and implement “across-the-board permanent marginal tax reductions.” Towards the end of his interview, however, a caller challenged Pence’s idea, saying that deficits exploded under Reagan, forcing the first President Bush to raise taxes.

Pence replied that the caller was right that Reagan “saw deficits and the national debt grow,” but claimed it was the fault of spending in Congress because Reagan’s tax cuts “resulted in more than a doubling of the revenues.” Pence then asked viewers to “check me on this”:

PENCE: You’re absolutely correct in saying that they saw deficits and the national debt grow under President Reagan, but it was — and check me on this, people can check things easily on the internet these days, check me on this — the rate reductions that President Reagan enacted resulted in more than a doubling of the revenues over the next seven years that went from the American people to the federal government.

Watch it at link~

ThinkProgress loves a challenge, so we looked into Pence’s claim. As he suggested, it wasn’t hard to find out on the internet that this common conservative claim is wrong.

As Media Matters noted when Sean Hannity made the same argument, revenues did not get close to doubling under Reagan:



Additionally, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has found that “Income tax receipts grew noticeably more slowly than usual in the 1980s, after the large cuts in individual and corporate income tax rates in 1981.” In contrast, “income tax collections grew much more rapidly in the 1990s,” when “marginal income tax rates at the top of the income spectrum were raised,” wrote CBPP

I hate it when they look at total revenues. Reagan cut the income tax rates (and later raised the FICA tax rates and some corporate taxes). So the relevant number is not total revenue, but income tax revenue.

Edit: my own debunking of this claim

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/53