This is actually misleading. You’re only right if the US stops spending. Biden has already said he wants to increase taxes to increase spending.
This is actually misleading, your statement is only correct if “spending” is replaced with “additional borrowing”. (Assuming the federal government has non-zero revenue, “spending” does not imply “additional borrowing”.)
Moreover, GP’s broader point – that the burden of federal debt can be reduced even if the total amount is not – applies more broadly than just the static-total-debt case, it can be true with additional net borrowing, so long as the debt service cost at year y+1 is a smaller share of the GDP than in year y (assuming debt service relative to debt for simplicity, this would hold if the debt: GDP ratio was the same or less, irrespective of the nominal, or even real, level of debt increasing.)
E.g., suppose the US has $25 trillion GDP and 37.5 trillion national debt. Over the course of one year, it reaches $26.25 trillion nominal GDP, $38.625 trillion nominal national debt, and has experienced 2% annual inflation, so that, in base year terms, real GDP is $25.735 trillion, real debt is $37.828 trillion. Nominal debt is up, Real debt is up. So is this worse? No, because debt:GDP dropped from 1.5 to 1.47, so – again, assuming constant debt service costs per $ of debt – the share of output needed to service the debt is reduced.
Further, if that spending goes into the economy it can lead to more people paying even more in taxes thereby increasing tax revenue even more....
Maybe you meant to reply to the parent? Because the 90s is within the time frame.
More taxes and lower defense spending made a huge impact, though solid economic growth obviously helped. We had an actual budget surplus from 1998 to 2001 though it was quickly ended by Bush.
Federal revenue as a share of GDP (the best measure of across-the-economy effective tax rate) went up from 2020 (16.0%) to 2021 (17.2%) and from 2021 (17.2%) to 2022 (19.0%).
Federal deficit in both nominal and share of GDP terms dropped in the same intervals, 2020 ($3.13 trillion, 14.7%) to 2021 ($2.78 trillion, 11.8%) to 2022 ($1.38 trillion, 5.3%).
Well what did you (intend to) ask for then?
The ball's in your court to clarify, because the phrase "taxes went up" could mean total collections in real dollars, it might mean total collection in real dollars per capita, or top theoretical marginal income rate, or average effective rate (which you just denied), or just income taxes and not other taxes, or income taxes and payroll taxes, ad nauseam.
There's no point finding historical examples only for you to declare that it doesn't count because it doesn't match your unstated hidden idea.