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In 1993, when Bill Clinton's first budget was being debated, Republicans said over and over again that the tax provisions -- cuts for the middle class, increases for the wealthy -- would cause a "job-killing recession." You heard that term hundreds of times. Of course, that didn't happen. So how does a conservative interpret the events that ensued? This is from Ezra Klein's interview with anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist:
EK: Just so I have this right: You’re arguing that the boom in the mid-1990s wasn’t because of the Internet or because we were snapping back from a recession, but because the election of a Republican Congress had a major confidence effect.GN: Yes. You knew Republicans would cut the capital gains tax and wouldn’t do the list of things Clinton had planned. Similarly, the economy is strengthening now because all the things Obama was going to do aren’t going to happen.It's interesting how someone who is such a huge advocate of the free market seems to believe that the entire American economy basically does nothing but sit around and wait to see who's in government, then when Republicans gain some power, just explodes and create 20 million jobs or so, for no reason other than that Newt Gingrich is now Speaker of the House. This kind of thinking is mirrored elsewhere. There are Republicans who will tell you with a straight face that the economic expansion of the 1990s happened entirely because Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981. It's hard to believe that the actions your opponents took actually had positive effects. If you spent months saying, "If the other side gets its bill passed, disaster will ensue," and then disaster doesn't ensue, you can decide that you were wrong all along and your opponents, whom you hate with a burning fire, were right. Or you can decide that you were basically right, it's just that some other variable intervened. Almost nobody on either side ever chooses the former.
