An article in the printed Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claimed that Ronald Reagan's tax-cuts are what stimulated the 80's economy and that the 80's boom was bigger than Clinton's 90's boom if one uses percent of adults employed as the metric.
While I agree that percent employed is a pretty good measure of jobs created, the rest of the analysis left some pretty big gaps. First, if you looked at their graph, you'd see that the 1979-1982 recession was deeper than the 1990-1992 recession. If you factor this in and ignore the steeper climb-out of the 80's recession then the difference in job growth between the Reagan boom and Clinton boom is almost nil using WSJ's own graph.
Second, the Reagan era was plagued by deficit spending, while the Clinton era ran a surplus (or at least close to it, as there are multiple metrics). Deficit spending acts as a stimulus, creating more jobs. Thus, the 80's job increase may be from deficit spending at least as much as tax cuts.
(Some Republicans blame the 80's spending on a Democratic Congress, but that doesn't change the analysis, for we are focusing on causes of job creation here, not deficit records.)
Third, most democrats are not against middle-class tax cuts. It is the ever-increasing size of the wealth class that is the problem, creating hubris and political bribery.
