Look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-...The tax rate cuts were fully in place in 1982-3 (the phased in delay the Democratic House insisted on put a lot of thing on hold till then, and likely extended the recession Reagan inherited, see below for more), then income tax revenue steadily marches up. (I fudge the year based on memory and how there are various effective years, e.g. there's the usually but not always a calendar year for tax rates (and some are retroactive in various ways!), they have to be fully payed in the next year, and the Federal fiscal year runs October 1 to September 30, e.g. 2016 starts October 1st, 2015.
All Krugman argues in that column you linked to is how we calculate the magnitude of the increase, he doesn't deny there wasn't a substantial one, he says 19% for 1980-88. Which of course substantially understates the reality (but also note you need to adjust for inflation, it was roaring when Reagan entered office, and the prime rate was 20% or greater (!)), since that includes the period before the rates fully changed after which people, including my father, changed their business behavior.
Ah, here's a table with accurate figures for all three types of income, "ordinary" AKA "unearned" (things like interest), "earned" (wages) and realized capital gains, http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course/Labortaxes/taxableincom... page 4 table A1, note Carter radically reduced the latter from 39.9%, also e.g. deregulated airlines and trucking, and note the JFK rate cuts from "I like Ike???" 91% !!! for income (and also note Reagan started indexing various details for inflation):
1980 70.0 50.0 28.0
1981 68.8 50.0 23.7
1982 50.0 50.0 20.0
1987 38.5 38.5 28.0
1988 28.8 28.0 28.0
Note again how the 1986 changes immediately increased capital gains tax rates while phasing in the income tax cuts.
The history of this is ferociously complicated, I haven't even mentioned the FICA rate increases, who's large excesses went into the general budget, filling Al Gore's infamous "lock box" with unmarketable Federal government IOUs (bonds). I "know" as much as I do since I came of age in the '70s, when all this really started to get out of hand, Nixon closed the gold window (for foreigners, FDR did for us in 1933), we were again allowed to own bullion gold, Nixon did his wage and price controls, the Yom-Kippur War resulted in an oil embargo, contemporaneously OPEC at least partly legitimately increased dollar oil prices since the dollar was being devalued (see gold window above), government control of oil and gas was retained when the wage and price controls were generally relaxed, all that resulted in the '70s "energy crisis", which ended when Reagan ended the controls, Carter's obsession with oil "windfall profits", etc. etc. etc.
Seriously, in many ways the economic history of the last decade and a half has been simpler....
