JFK Would Join Today's Tea Party

Along with Reagan, ideas of lower taxes are the classic foundation of sound economic policy!

There are some who assert that Ronald Reagan would not be welcome in today's Republican Party. Rubbish! Reagan would be leading the charge for smaller government and less taxes. That's the platform he ran on and the one on which he built the longest and most robust economic recovery in American history.

Reagan would feel right at home with the Tea Party and so would John F. Kennedy. Watch the following short video. Can you imagine Obama saying this today?

JFK embraces tax cuts to spur economic growth 50 years ago and 20 years before Reagan signed his landmark legislation.

In the Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby asks "Would Democrats embrace JFK now?":

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 institute 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.”

Those who say the Republican Party has done too far right first need to answer why the Democrat Party has gone so far left that they would abandon JFK. Both Reagan and JFK had the right idea and history has proven their case. Why do today's Democrats deny it?