Time to play economic literacy 101 with another supply-sider. Rep. Mike Pence, a conservative Republican who ran unsuccessfully for minority leader, writes in the Wall Street Journal today that the 1990 tax increase signed by George H.W. Bush “ushered in economic recession”:

We have been down this road before. In 1990, I was a young candidate for Congress when the last Bush administration sided with a Democrat majority in Congress to pass the largest tax increase in history, all in the name of bipartisanship and compromise. This compromise ushered in economic recession and a two-term Democratic administration in the White House. We cannot walk down the 1990 road to “compromise” again.

However, the National Bureau of Economic Research dates the beginning of the recession to July 1990, and the compromise bill that included a tax increase wasn’t enacted until November 1990. Bush didn’t even indicate he would support a tax increase until late June. This makes the Laffer Curve look like rigorous social science.