The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler offers a highly misleading account of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, saying they were “passed for the wrong reasons” and implying that, since there was no real need to cut taxes then, there’s no real problem with raising them now.  (Kessler makes his claim in the context of admitting that an analogy used by Paul Ryan is “technically accurate,” although Kessler opines that he finds the analogy “misleading.”)

According to White House historical tables (Table 1.3), wherever you start the clock — at the end of World War II, in 1970, or in 1990 — revenues through 2008 averaged 18 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). That’s the percentage of the economy that Americans have historically paid in taxes (at least in the postwar period; it was only 7 percent in 1940). It’s also the same percentage (18 percent) that they would pay in taxes over the 10-year span of the Ryan-authored House budget.