Holy Marilyn Monroe! Another Blonde Woman Has Agitated a Kennedy.
Oh dear, Edward M. Kennedy, Jr., is furious with Republican United States Senate candidate Linda McMahon for quoting his uncle. One of her campaign ads features a clip of President John F. Kennedy explaining the importance of tax cuts to a stalled economy. As part of his plan to invigorate the economy, President Kennedy wanted to cut taxes dramatically, especially for high earners and business. He met fierce opposition from Congress and members of his economic policy team. He persisted and prevailed.
Arthur Schlesinger, house historian of Camelot, writes of one part of JFK’s comprehensive tax plans in A Thousands Days, his 1965 chronicle of the Kennedy administration:
[I]n July 1962 the Treasury announced……the liberalization of depreciation allowances, a measure intended to increase capital investment but representing an act of government generosity to business which even the Eisenhower administration had never undertaken.
Mr. Kennedy, who taped a television commercial for fellow scion Ned Lamont’s unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial campaign this summer, wrote to Mrs. McMahon to tell her that tax policy and economic fundamentals today are not what they were in 1962 because “economic conditions back then were vastly different than they are today.” True enough, national unemployment averaged 5.5% in 1962, far from the 9% it has reached today in Connecticut.
The Kennedy tax cuts are credited with starting an economic expansion that was robust enough to pay to send 16,000 thousand of American military advisers into South Vietnam. You know what came after that.
4 comments
Ted Kennedy Jr. sounds foolish making this demand on McMahon. Yeah, he’s a nephew of the late President but he hardly has the right to make such demands or tell people who can quote or use Pres. Kennedy’s words. He doesn’t own his Uncle’s image, speeches or opinions. Nor should he distort them to help Blumenthal. Plus, Teddy is just plain ignorant or so blindly partisan in favor of his friend Blumenthal that he can’t even see straight enough to recognize that his uncle understood that raising taxes on any strata of the citizenry in a recessionary environment is dumb economic policy.
Yeah, that was pointed out to Obama when Charlie Rose prefaced his question to Candidate Obama with “It’s been repeatedly shown that every time the tax rate on the highest earners is raised much above 28%, that a recession occurs, given that, will you insist upon raising those taxes as you’ve consistently said up to this point?” Our president did not blink an eye in saying, “Charlie, I just believe we need to be fair.”
Kevin has a good point about Ted Kennedy, Jr. If his last name was O’Brien instead of Kennedy, would Lamont have used him in a campaign commercial? No. What Ned was really invoking was not the endorsement of Ted Jr., but the ghosts of Ted Jr.’s father and uncle.
What’s even more idiotic is the continued deification of JFK. The myth of Camelot has slowly been debunked, but it’s still absurd the extent to which we revere a president who only served around a thousand days in office, during which time, often in a drug induced stupor, he went nearly nonstop dog on his wife… a man who arguably brought the world to the edge of nuclear war and operated campaigns in which the electioneering and dirtiness would make even the most cynical political operator today blush.
The point is that invoking JFK’s legacy is only successful to the extent that people are idiots who revere him as a fallen God of the Republic. His death was tragic, sure, but he was only a man, and not a particularly good one. Logically speaking, his endorsement of an idea shouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.
I think you’re site’s moderator has become more sensitive of late Kevin.