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JFK was an inherited-wealth East Coast Establishment 1%er.
Much like St Ronnie, he drastically cut taxes on his own wealthy ass.
America was growing like crazy in his term, because of the postwar boom, not because he cut taxes on the wealthy.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2...uZJ/story.html
As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn’t one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy’s stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it’s a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy’s approach to government or embrace his political beliefs.
Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.
The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.
He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to ins ute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.’ ”
On the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation’s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. “We must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,” JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today’s levels. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit for building the US military into “a defense system second to none.”
Since that terrible day in Dallas 50 years ago, popular mythology has turned Kennedy into a liberal hero. Some of that mythmaking, as journalist and historian Ira Stoll argues in a new book, “JFK, Conservative,” was driven by Kennedy aides, such as Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had always wanted their boss to be more left-leaning than he was. Some of it was fueled by the Democratic Party’s emotional connection to the memory of a martyred president, and its understandable desire to link their priorities to his legacy.
But Kennedy was no liberal. By any reasonable definition, he was a conservative — and not just by the standards of our era, but by those of his era as well.
Stoll draws on an embarrassment of riches to make his case.
When the young JFK launched his first political campaign for the US House in 1946, a profile in Look magazine homed in on his conservatism:
“When young, wealthy, and conservative John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced for Congress, many people wondered why,” it began. “Hardly a liberal even by his own standards, Kennedy is mainly concerned by what appears to him as the coming struggle between collectivism and capitalism. In speech after speech he charges his audience ‘to battle for the old ideas with the same enthusiasm that people have for new ideas.’ ”
He hadn’t changed his political stripes by the time he ran for the Senate in 1952, challenging in bent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Stoll notes that Massachusetts newspapers wanting to back a liberal in that race came out for the Republican — the Berkshire Eagle, for example, endorsed Lodge as “an invaluable voice for liberalism.” When his reelection in 1958 made it clear that Kennedy would be running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked in a TV interview whom she would support if forced to choose “between a conservative Democrat like Kennedy and a liberal Republican [like] Rockefeller.” FDR’s widow, then as now a progressive icon, answered that she would do all she could to make sure Kennedy wouldn’t be the party’s nominee.
Many on the left felt that way about JFK. When he decided to resume nuclear testing in 1962, Bertrand Russell attacked him as “much more wicked than Hitler,” and Linus Pauling, who would receive that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, predicted that he would “go down in history as . . . one of the greatest enemies of the human race.” Left-wing intellectuals raged against Kennedy’s failed attempt to topple Fidel Castro (the renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills said the administration had “returned us to barbarism”). Liberals within the administration expressed dismay for Kennedy’s unwavering support for tax cuts. Schlesinger called one of Kennedy’s exhortations “the worst speech the president had ever given.”
Nearly 30 years ago, an essay in Mother Jones magazine asked: “Would JFK Be a Hero Now?” If the answer wasn’t obvious then, it certainly is now. In today’s political environment, a candidate like JFK — a conservative champion of economic growth, tax cuts, limited government, peace through strength — plainly would be a hero. Whether he would be a Democrat is a different matter altogether.
JFK was an inherited-wealth East Coast Establishment 1%er.
Much like St Ronnie, he drastically cut taxes on his own wealthy ass.
America was growing like crazy in his term, because of the postwar boom, not because he cut taxes on the wealthy.
Well, there you have it.
aka, class warfare
wealthy Dems are progressive socially but conservative tax-cuttingly, aka, class warfare.
It's a good point.
Democrats today would treat Kennedy almost as bad as they do Reagan.
and Repug's today wouldn't let Reagan get past the primary (he raised taxes 3 times, etc, etc), and Nixon would be seen as a liberal (opening to China, tried to get a national health insurance going, EPA, OSHA, etc)
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-21-2013 at 12:08 PM.
boutons with the rare on target riposte.
WhineHole with the rare credit to Boutons vs his many many whiny misses.
With the exception of the space program, I was never all that enamored with JFK.
JFK was a big fan of mein fuhrer
The better question is would JFK seek to enact the same polices in today's world. Politicians platforms are at least in part a reflection of the world they live in. Taxes weren't tis low in JFK's era and the military certainly isn't what it is today - either in size or capability. We certainly don't have a big bad communist bogeyman to fear, either. But I guess acknowledging all that isn't conducive to writing an editorial with a specific agenda with no grounds in reality.
Is that in the stars?
No, he was most ceratinly not! Are you some kind of Hitler supporter? Who are you?
That's nonsense I'll provide links after work
You mean the guy that gave up his entire Presidential salary to charity??
Reagan would have been tea partied...
This. Tax rates were obscenely high on the rich in that era and we were trying to break the Soviet Union. Plus a lot of military R&D went into the space program. I can't ing believe how short-sighted we are with science spending now, especially with the supercollider that would have made the Dallas area the world center for physics research. I just hope we find a way to get the Webb funded and put in space so we can look into star factories like the Orion nebula in the IR spectrum.
The Myth of JFK as Supply Side Tax CutterThe notion of Kennedy as tax-cutting hero dates at least to the 1970s, when then Rep. Jack Kemp was writing the tax-cut legislation that Reagan would sign in 1981. Since then, political ads contrasting clips of JFK advocating tax cuts with the target Democrat of the moment have appeared regularly. See, for example, Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Linda McMahon in Connecticut last year.
The argument that JFK's economic policies are more closely aligned with the modern GOP than Democrats is doubly attractive for conservatives. They can paint their tax cut-centric policies as having a rich bipartisan past abandoned by the modern left—and tweak liberals by absconding with one of their icons.
The notion of Kennedy as supply-side forerunner is a powerful myth, but it is a myth. Context is key. Conservatives love to quote a speech Kennedy gave at the Economic Club of New York in December 1962. Here's one quote—I've italicized the crucial part often left out: "Our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking." JFK was not expounding an implacable economic philosophy; he was speaking about a very specific cir stance. The top marginal tax rate was 91 percent, which JFK wanted reduced to a "more sensible" 65 percent. Compare that with today's 35 percent top rate, and ask: If supply-siders are so enamored of JFK's tax policies, would they advocate a return to a "more sensible" 65 percent top rate? Applying Kennedy's tax talk to the current structure, JFK biographer Robert Dallek says, is like comparing "apples and watermelons."
note that from 1945 - 1975 when marginal tax rates were high, US growth was fantastic, and wealth distributed much evenly than the horrible inequality now.
note also how VRWC's St Ronnie cut the tax rate on the highest while raising it on the lowest.
There was also that thing about the rest of the first world being in ruins after the Great Patriotic War.
It's all the fault of the British and French assholes
ok, if you can show that the rest of the world had enough $Ts to buy USA exports
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