Everyone knows that John F. Kennedy was a Democrat. Everyone knows he is one of the all-time heroes of the Baby-Boomer generation and of liberals in general.
What few people know is that in December of 1962 he gave this speech.
If you have to, watch it again and really focus on his words. Notice the sharp contrast between his statements and his philosophical beliefs to that of our current President. Notice whether he makes a contrast between rich and poor, small businesses and corporations or whether he discusses the distribution of income, "the top 1%" or anything else that comes even remotely close to the beliefs of Barack Obama.
Before there was Reagan and his view of income taxes, there was John F. Kennedy. A true statesman and economically literate human being.
If you are a Democrat, here is your hero. It is possible to remain a Democrat, but be an economically intelligent one.
Kennedy was.
It is interesting that the law that JFK proposed and that Johnson signed lowered the top marginal rate for individuals to 70 percent. The rate this year is something like 39 percent. I suppose some people saw JFK's action at the time as radical. Sure doesn't look that way now. He had a lot of room to work with.
ReplyDeleteIf it matters to you, JFK is not any kind of hero to me. He waffled on civil rights issues, thinking them a nuisance. He almost managed to start world war three. He and his wife were pretty, that's about all. I'm not, by inference, saying that Obama is a great leader either, by the way. But for my money, Barry is more aligned with traditional liberal values than JFK was. Strange to think that at the time of Eisenhower and Kennedy, there were many Republicans who were to the left of them, especially on social issues.
Most Democrats and Republicans are totally confused about reality. They think the spectrum is liberal vs conservative, left vs right. They couldn’t be farther from the truth.
ReplyDeleteThe spectrum is government vs no-government. On the left end is full totalitarianism and the right full anarchy. We were pretty much in the middle when the US was founded, but over time, we keep moving to the left. The two political parties are left and right of each other but they are both now firmly entrenched on the left.
John Kennedy sounds like Ronald Reagan on taxes because he was. The viewpoints of both democrats and republicans have moved to the left while John Kennedy remains fixed in his position on the scale.
You can’t be a democrat and have economic sense because the two concepts are contrary to each other. To be a democrat means you are continually moving towards full government control of all aspects of society. Unfortunately, the democrats are followed by the republicans who think they are conservative, but that is true only in a relativistic concept.