Is that highest revenue corrected for inflation?
Of course inflation isn't quite the right measure. Tax revenue is tied more closely to GNP, which grows somewhat faster than inflation. This is true even if the President does nothing. It is true that the President claims that his plan increases revenue by growing the economy. But attempting to demonstrate that the President's actions are responsible for a shift in GNP is notoriously difficult. (And there is a considerable lag, so it takes some time for changes that they are responsible for to show up.) Furthermore the amount of growth that we've seen under this President, while respectable, has not exactly been stellar. (And the measure of things that matter to most of us, like employment statistics and wages, have sucked pretty badly.)
However the following are all verifiable and true statements:
- Tax revenues are below projections before Bush entered office. (To be fair, those projections were significantly skewed by the dot com boom.)
- The economy has grown less than projected before Bush entered office. (Same note as before.)
- Given current economic growth, tax revenues are below what they would have been with the old tax rules.
- Tax revenues have consistently been less than the President's budget forecast. As time has progressed, the shortfall has been growing.
- Spending has consistently been more than the President's budget forecast. And his budgets haven't exactly been forecasting balanced budgets.
- Deficits have therefore been growing very rapidly.
Now [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Modern_presidential_records|here] is an interesting chart of how the debt has fluctuated. It leaves out a lot of important things, like inflation rates and how the economy did. But in recent decades the only president who did worse than George Bush in controlling the debt was the other George Bush. (Who had the excuse that he had an economy that was officially in recession.)
Cheers,
Ben