A great advantage of having been present when history was made is that later you can sometimes recall what actually happened. Such institutional memory is important today in assessing the 1981 Reagan tax cuts, whose effect is now being relitigated in the debate on the Republicans’ proposed tax reform. To refute claims that the Reagan tax cuts slashed federal revenue, in the words of President Reagan, “well, let’s take them on a little stroll down memory lane.”

In 1980, the year before Reagan became president, the Congressional Budget Office reported: “During much of the past decade, many taxpayers have found themselves paying larger fractions of their incomes to the federal government in income taxes.” Double-digit inflation in the late 1970s pushed American families into ever-higher tax brackets (there were 15 at the time). This process, called “bracket creep,” drove up taxes almost 50% faster than inflation, enriching the government while impoverishing workers.

Thus even though the 1970s were the postwar era’s weakest decade of economic growth up to that point, federal revenue doubled between 1976 and 1981. Inflation averaged 9.7% during the economic malaise of 1977-80, while government revenue grew by an astonishing 14.8% a year, even as economic growth rates fell steadily and turned negative in 1980.

That same year the CBO estimated that inflation and bracket creep would automatically increase revenue by 2.7% of gross national product by 1985. Today, that would translate into some $500 billion a year—almost eight times as large as President Obama’s 2013 tax increase. But the CBO warned that this would push the tax burden to “an unprecedented level, constituting a significant fiscal drag on the economy.” The CBO humanized the problem by reporting that with the 1980 inflation rate of 13.3%, the tax liability on families of four with incomes between $15,000 and $50,000 (equivalent to roughly $50,000 to $150,000 today) increased by an average of 23%. The poverty rate surged and average family income after inflation dropped by a whopping 8.9%. Just as the CBO predicted, the unprecedented tax burden choked off economic growth, pushing the U.S. into the double-dip recession of 1980-82.

Critics of the Reagan tax cuts today compare the 11.6% growth in federal revenue in 1980, the last year of the Carter administration, with the decline in revenue in 1983. They then declare that the Reagan tax cuts slashed federal revenue. Conveniently missing in that comparison is that the 1980-82 recession, with 10.8% unemployment, reduced federal revenue twice as much as the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the Reagan tax cuts would in 1982 and 15% more than its estimate for 1983.