When George HW Bush said, “Read my lips: no new taxes” as he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1988, he thought he was on safe ground. And he would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids in Congress, where a Democratic majority forced him to put up taxes in a 1990 budget.
Bush insisted that he hadn’t imposed any “new taxes” – he had only increased existing ones. And, surprisingly, American voters seemed to accept this sophistry. He seemed so popular that the Democrats struggled to find a candidate to put up against him in the 1992 election.
