“I’ve surprised liberals on more than one occasion by reminding them of JFK’s broad tax cuts”
JFK was “open” to tax cuts - it was his Sec Tres. C. Douglas Dillon - a Republican - who designed, sold them to Kennedy and the financial community and implemented them.
http://www.keenzo.com/showproduct.asp?ID=1919876
“The next time Heller saw Kennedy was in December, in the Georgetown living room. Kennedy nodded toward the dining room where C. Douglas Dillon, Eisenhower’s Undersecretary of State, was on the telephone. “I’ve asked him to be Secretary of the Treasury,” Kennedy told Heller. Dillon was calling to get Ike’s permission to join the enemy. Eisenhower tried to discourage him, telling him he was being used by liberals who would inevitably undermine sound money principles.
“I think Dillon will accept and I need you as a counterweight,” the President-elect told Heller. “He has conservative leanings, and I know your leanings are liberal.” Kennedy had that 5 percent growth he had promised on his mind, his promise to “Get the country moving again!” Heller’s mission was to figure out how to make it happen. Dillon’s mission would be to make sure Heller did not go too far and take Kennedy with him.
As he was leaving, Heller asked: “What about a tax cut?” Kennedy said he was not against it, but that he could not do it just after calling on Americans to sacrifice.
What he told Dillon a moment later was that he needed the confidence of the financial community, and Dillon as former chairman of Dillon, Read Company was a member of the highest standing. “I’ll put up Walter Heller because I have to for political reasons,” Kennedy told him. “But I will do nothing without your recommendation. I will always refer to you as my chief financial adviser.”
“How can you do this?” asked Kennedy’s next visitor, Democratic Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee. Not only was Dillon a Republican, he had given $30,000 to Richard Nixon’s campaign. “If you want someone rich from Wall Street, pick Averell Harriman.”
“Too old,” said Kennedy.
Besides, he was trying to put together a bipartisan government, with Republicans as his shields on defense and economics. “Sound” was the image he wanted to project.
“Don’t worry about this,” he told Gore. Kennedy said he was going to appoint a liberal Harvard professor, Stanley Surrey, to be the assistant secretary in charge of tax policy.
“That’s not going to work,” said Gore, who had sat next to Kennedy in the Senate. “You’re going to be busy with a million things. Don’t you know that? Dillon will make the policy. Nobody’s going to listen to some assistant secretary.”
“Albert,” Kennedy said, “I got less than 50 percent of the vote. The first requirement of the Treasury job is acceptability to the financial community.””
Also hit them with the fact that real tax cuts bring in more money to the fed every time they’ve been done. They should love that part but don’t.
Interesting.
I still don't think that JFK would have become as radical as his brother Ted, or the rest of the Socialist Democrats. He was a WWII vet, and knew firsthand that America has enemies that want to destroy us.
I also think that Khrushchev and Castro took a good ten years off his life with the Bay of Pigs episode.
Despite any liberal leanings he had, the danger of Communism was real and in his face. I don't think he would have ever fallen for commie-lite, the way his successors have.