"1993 Tax Increase
The speaker didn’t mention a 1993 tax increase that raised the top individual marginal rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood until 2001. In 1998, the government recorded its first budget surplus in almost 30 years.
The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in 1994, the year after Congress passed the second tax increase of the decade. The growth rate dropped to 2.5 percent in 1995, and thereafter rose to 3.7 percent in 1996. The economy grew more than 4 percent a year from 1997 through 2000.
The 1990s were a period of “stalemate between the Republican Congress” and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, that paved the way for balanced budgets because there was “no major giveaway legislation,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official who is Institute Chair at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Washington."
Other than it being political suicide, why aren't we doing something similar? I know that nobody wants to say "tax increase" out loud, but isn't it going to get there eventually anyway?