“Rolling taxes back to the 1990s would be a disaster for our job-creating businesses,” were the fearful words in the newspaper ad copy, paid for by an arm of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, generally considered the most aggressively anti-tax and anti-government of several powerful business lobbies.

One can just imagine readers going, “Ohhhh, noooo, not the 1990s!” Visions of Joey Buttafuoco, O.J., and Monica Lewinsky dance in their heads. And the implication that the voters will then think what a job-creating disaster that decade was. Except, anybody who was alive and cognitive should remember the opposite: a time of unparallel growth and broadening prosperity.

There’s a growing consensus among responsible progressives and some political moderates in favor of a partial return to the higher federal and Minnesota tax rates of the 1990s level, especially for those wealthy folks who get most of the large tax cuts early in the ‘00s. The case is reinforced by the fact that those at the top continue to acquire an ever larger percentage of wealth and income, and now have a larger share than they’ve had since 1929.

After all, the federal debt is once again frighteningly large, the Iraq War and Homeland Security bills are on a credit card, and the disinvestment in our nation’s human capital and physical infrastructure, in things like schools and bridges and public health, is threatening our future. Plus, the current anti-government, anti-tax course at the federal and state level is not working to produce general prosperity.

But to this modest tax proposal we get the same old rant-and-can, and now this new and inexplicable reference to the 1990s is unacceptable.

Let’s review the federal and the state scene to assess just how it all happened, and to measure just how big a disaster we endured in the 1990s.

At the federal level, after years of ignoring federal deficits and after the rise of a truly maverick presidential candidate (Ross Perot) who ran against virtually nothing else, the federal government under Democratic President Bill Clinton raised taxes and balanced the budget at the end of the decade.

In Minnesota, Republican Gov. Arne Carlson reluctantly agreed to a sales tax increase to balance the state’s deficit, but then went ahead with a modest health-care provider tax and, yes, yet another governmental program, MinnesotaCare, that provided health coverage to tens of thousands of working Minnesotans.

Recipe for economic disaster? Hardly.

The 1990s gave us the longest sustained period of national economic growth in modern times. And Minnesota, which all during that decade and for decades before, ranked in the top 10 among the states in taxes as a percentage of income, became an economic super-achiever.

Newspaper “help wanted” sections were inches thick. Poverty and crime rates declined. Families in the middle incomes made real inflation-adjusted gains, their best progress in the three decades of generally rising inequality and concentration of wealth in the top tiers. Minnesota rose to its highest ever ranking in average income, also in the top 10. And state and federal budget surpluses mounted, setting off the inevitable hue-and-cry for tax cuts.

There was wild talk at the time to the effect that some sort of economic nirvana had been reached, and that the boom would never end. When Congress and the Minnesota Legislature ignored warnings about an inevitable economic downturn, and pushed through substantial federal and state income tax cuts, the proponent of that legislation scoffed at downturn talk and glowingly promised even further “supply-side” investment and prosperity as far as the seers could see.

It did not quite happen. A recession set in almost immediately after the cuts and the pathetic recovery of the last few years did little to repair the damage done to most households. Now the state and the nation are either in or on the verge of another recession and more budget shortfalls are projected.

The lost revenue from the tax cuts amounts to hundreds of billions on the national scene and the cuts in 1999 and 2000 – the largest income tax cuts in Minnesota’s history – means that the state is now forgoing some $1 billion a year in revenue.

Assuredly, there are all kinds of important factors that affect international, national and state economies. And many economists tell us that marginal tax changes, higher or lower, are not the most important determinants at all. Much more important are things like technology advances, and other dramatic fluctuations in the economic, political and social world, where 95 percent of the human population is not American and 99.9 percent is not Minnesotan.

Further, raising taxes does not ensure prosperity, even in a legitimate and responsible democratic system that we enjoy in this country and state. That money needs to be invested with accountability and hardheaded good sense in the things we know will expand opportunity and fairness – education, transportation, health, and environmental protections and energy independence. 

But U.S. and Minnesota taxes were higher and the pattern of investments they financed were good for us in previous decades. The U.S. has long had the lowest taxes of the industrialized democracies than our peer nations. And it also has worse indicators on economic inequality, health and quality-of-life measurers.

Minnesota has slumped to below-average and near 30^th among the states in total state-local revenues that are available for public purposes, and there are plenty of signs that we are slipping on our once envied top-of-the-heap indicators.

So let’s take a gamble on those tax rates that coexisted – no cause-and-effect, mind you – with the roaring ‘90s, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Minnesota Twins’ second World Series championship, more chicken in every pot, and Windows 98 in tens of millions of middle-class homes. Also one of my favorite songs of all time, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”