Two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together "constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime," Thorndike said.

But is this increase the largest in American history? Perhaps — as measured by the rather useless yardstick of raw dollars, with no adjustment for inflation. We rely here on recently updated tables from U.S. Treasury Department tax analyst Jerry Tempalski, whose 2006 paper on “Revenue Effects of Major Tax Bills” is the standard reference for making such comparisons.

Tempalski (a career employee who has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations) uses unpublished Treasury Department estimates, which are by no means low-ball figures. Treasury’s figures for the health care law are actually higher than those of either JCT or CBO for the key year 2014, when major provisions of the law take effect.

We’ve used Tempalski’s figure for that year — the highest one he cites — and compared it to the highest 1-year figure given for each of the tax increases since 1968. (No earlier tax increase comes close in terms of unadjusted dollars.)

By this measure, the Affordable Care Act’s $76.8 billion in revenue increases tops the $65.9 billion for the highest single year for Bill Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction bill, which Republicans have for years attacked as the biggest in history. But as we’ve said before, that attack is misleading, and the raw-dollar measure is a poor way to measure the size of a tax increase.

For one thing, that measure doesn’t take account of inflation. Using “constant” dollars — all adjusted to equal the value of a dollar in 2009 — the ACA drops to fourth place, and the tax increase signed in 1982 by President Reagan becomes the largest since 1968.

But even this measure takes no account of a population that is steadily rising. Today’s population is 82 million higher than it was at the time of Reagan’s 1982 increase, and 56 million higher than it was when Clinton signed the 1993 increase. So the average tax increases in those years was accordingly higher on a per-person basis than the ACA.

Incomes are also up since those times — even adjusting for inflation, and despite declines since the economic crisis of 2008. So the effect on the average person’s paycheck would be reduced even further, compared to earlier increases.