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How John F. Kennedy created extraordinary prosperity.

Jfk-appletonExcerpt from Breitbart:

As Kudlow and Domitrovic remind us in JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, Kennedy confronted relatively slow growth when he entered office in 1961 after campaigning on the stimulative slogan, “Get the country moving again.” Yet at first, the 35th President was at a loss as to proceed; his economic advisers were all over the place, policy-wise, and Congress had its own ideas.

Kennedy’s solution—arrived at only after two years of internal and external wrangling, as skillfully recounted by the authors—was to propose a massive across-the-board cut in income tax rates.

It might seem hard to believe that the top tax rate back in the early sixties was 91 percent (today it’s 39.6 percent); the authors rightly call that nine-tenths rate “nose-bleeding”—and, of course, it was counter-productive, because nobody could be expected to work or invest in the face of such a confiscatory rate.

The Kennedy tax cut was finally enacted in 1964, after JFK’s death; the top rate was reduced to 70 percent, and, of course, every other worker and investor also got a tax cut.  The result was an economic boom; as Kennedy himself had said in 1963, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Yet in the late 1970s, America was suffering through another patch of slow growth, a perverse combination of joblessness and inflation, dubbed “stagflation.”

Once again, it was across-the-board tax-rate reductions to the rescue.  With help from Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, and other “supply-siders”—that is, economists focusing on liberating the productive side of the economy from over-taxation and over-regulation—Ronald Reagan had the same idea as JFK: Cut tax rates, get the economy moving again.  As Kudlow and Domitrovic explain, “JFK’s true heirs returned to the White House in the Reagan era.”

Read more at Breitbart

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