But….maybe not. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities provides this handy chart demonstrating the difference between the recession of 1990 and the recession of 2001. Bottom line: the economy eventually got better both times! Once with tax increases and once with tax cuts. As the authors dryly put it, the lesson from this is not that tax increases are great for the economy, but that “weak recoveries eventually tend to improve, whether there are tax cuts, tax increases, or no tax changes at all.”
Max has more. As does the increasingly annoyed (of late) Matt Yglesias.