Update: I actually should have used total federal receipts, not just taxes. When you do this the pattern is weaker but basically the same: Real revenue growth 36 percent in the 8 years before Reagan, 26 percent under Reagan, 28 percent in the years following.

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Last summer the editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star declared that she won’t be running any more op-eds by Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. She had cause: Moore had published an article that purported to refute my debunking of claims about the miraculous effects of tax cuts, but all of his numbers were wrong — they didn’t cover the time period he claimed, there were further inexplicable errors of fact, and all of the errors, surprise, tilted the supposed results in the direction he wanted.

But while the Kansas City Star may have had enough of Moore, the door is always open at the Washington Post.

As PGL at Econospeak points out, Moore’s latest contains one outright lie — and it’s a lie about yours truly. Moore declares that

Critics such as economist Paul Krugman object that rapid growth during the Reagan years was driven more by conventional Keynesian deficit spending than by reductions in tax rates.

No, I’ve never said that. I’ve written many times that both the 1979-82 slump and the recovery thereafter were driven by monetary policy:

The architect of America’s great disinflation was Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman. In fact, Mr. Volcker began the process in 1979, when he adopted the tight monetary policy that caused that record unemployment rate. He was also mainly responsible for the recovery that followed: it was his decision to loosen up on the money supply in the summer of 1982 that set the stage for the rebound a few months later.

The main reason recovery has been slower since the 2008 crisis is that we’ve hit the zero lower bound, preventing the kind of dramatic monetary loosening that took place in 1982, and also that we’ve seen unprecedented fiscal austerity. Oh, and I predicted the slow recovery in advance.

Still, did Moore get any numbers wrong this time? Not exactly — but he did do his best to convey a false impression. He declares that under Reagan

the government’s budget numbers show that tax receipts expanded from $517 billion in 1980 to $909 billion in 1988 — close to a 75 percent change (25 percent after inflation).

I have a suspicion that the Post forced him to include the inflation-adjusted number, rather than let him get away with the gee-whiz nominal number, which is, um, inflated by the relatively high rate of inflation that prevailed even in the later Reagan years. In any case, however, Moore offers no context, leaving the impression that this was an extraordinary achievement.

So I looked at real federal receipts over a longer period, shown above using a log scale so that the slope of the line represents the rate of growth. If you take the period Reagan was in the White House, 1981:1 to 1989:1, I get an increase of 14.3 percent; I’m not sure why Moore’s number is bigger, but never mind. What you might want to do, however, is compare that performance with the 8 years preceding and the 8 years following. And here’s what we get:

1973:1-1981:1: 30.3%

1981:1-1989:1: 14.3%

1989:1-1997:1: 31.4%

Laffer roolz! Or maybe not.

Does the WaPo mind being used as a platform for deliberately deceptive innuendo, with some plain old falsehoods thrown in for good measure?