Why the Republicans’ admiration for JFK is misplaced

It’s always nice to see Republicans praising a Democratic president, so I’m hesitant to discourage them, but to see the GOP misusing and misrepresenting John F. Kennedy’s tax cutting agenda from 40 years ago is disturbing.

To hear Republicans talk, you’d think George W. Bush had chosen JFK as his personal hero the same way Clinton did.

Bush frequently cites JFK’s tax cuts as evidence of the prudence of his own policies, Ari Fleischer does the same thing when touting Bush’s tax cut plan to the White House press corps. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary John Snow was on Meet the Press saying Kennedy’s tax cuts worked and “it’s going to work again.” In April, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, among the most conservative in the nation, started calling any Democrat who supports tax cuts “JFK Democrats.”

Worst of all, the Club for Growth, best known for its scurrilous ads against GOP moderates who occasionally buck the national party, has launched a new round of TV ads saying we should support Bush’s goal of following Kennedy’s tax cutting example.

“President Kennedy cut income taxes, and the economy soared,” the announcer in the ad says. (By the same logic, the economy should have soared after Congress passed Bush’s 2001 tax cut — the largest tax cuts in U.S. history — but that didn’t happen.)

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), JFK’s brother, has asked the Club for Growth to pull the ads from the air.

“To equate President Bush’s tax proposal with President Kennedy’s tax plan is politically irresponsible and grossly inaccurate,” Kennedy wrote. “If President Kennedy were here today, he would be outraged.” Naturally, the group is rejecting Kennedy’s request to pull the ads.

The reason the GOP’s love for Kennedy’s tax cutting policies is misplaced is the context of the cuts of 40 years ago vs. the cuts of today. When JFK proposed a significant tax cut, tax rates still largely reflected increased rates passed to finance World War II. The country, at the time, had virtually no debt, no deficit, and low inflation. We could afford what Kennedy was proposing and his plan was ultimately passed.

It’s also worth noting that Kennedy’s plan distributed “peace dividends” broadly across the wage spectrum. As the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation explained at the time, the bottom 85 percent of the population received 59 percent of the benefits of JFK’s tax cut. The top 2.4 percent received 17.4 percent of the tax cut, and the top 0.4 percent received just six percent of it.

Bush and his conservative allies, on the other hand, are doing a poor job if they’re trying to follow JFK’s example. Whereas Kennedy was shifting America to post-war tax brackets, Bush is cutting taxes and fighting a war. Kennedy had almost no debt, while Bush has the largest deficits and debt in the history of the world. Kennedy made sure all income brackets benefited from a tax cut, while Bush proposes huge breaks for the very wealthy and hopes the money will trickle down to the rest of us.

If the Bush administration wants to praise President Kennedy, that’s great. But if we’d all be better off if Bush started governing like Kennedy, too.