Deflating the "Clinton Defense"

An old canard that the American Left likes to fall back on: the economic growth we experienced during the Clinton era was a result of the Clinton tax increases (which is an absurd notion at the outset). However, this tidy little report from the Heritage Foundation debunks that quite nicely.

Summary: while it's true that GDP experienced a respectable 3.2% growth from 1993 (the year Clinton enacted his tax increases), real wages saw almost no growth at all. It wasn't until 1997, when the Republican-led Congress lowered taxes on both income and capital gains that GDP growth went up a full 1% from 1997-2000 to 4.2%, and real wages grew 6.5%.