"That boom came after Kennedy got Congress to try to stimulate the economy by passing a "liberal" agenda that included:
Increasing the minimum wage.
Expanding unemployment benefits.
Boosting Social Security benefits to encourage workers to retire earlier.
Spending more for highway construction."
.
"Congress finally approved the tax cuts in early 1964, three months after Kennedy's assassination. The following fiscal year, the federal budget deficit did indeed shrink. Stock investors loved it. Between 1962 and 1966, the Dow Jones industrial average nearly doubled.
To this day, conservatives point to that robust period as evidence that cutting taxes will lead to higher revenues.
But liberals say conservatives' interpretation is misleading because conditions were so different in the early 1960s, when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent.
The Kennedy-backed tax cuts took down that rate to 70 percent. Today, the highest rate is 39.6 percent. Cutting the top tax bracket now would not have the same impact because it already has been lowered several times, the argument goes.
"You can only go to the well so many times before you lose effectiveness," says David Shreve, an economic historian who has written about the Kennedy-era tax cuts.
Shreve says there's another factor conservatives overlook: Kennedy's biggest tax cuts were aimed at average wage earners in hopes they would spend more.
Boosting the demand side of the economy "gave us the widest prosperity and longest unbroken run of growth in history" up to then.
In contrast, conservatives focus on "supply-side" cuts, which target the marginal tax rates for wealthier individuals. The goal is to encourage them to invest more and expand output."
www.npr.org
Yeah, so I was wrong, he only took the top rates down to 70 percent.
Then cuts for the lower tax brackets, and investment in infrastructure.
And NO deficit spending, but reducing the deficit instead.
Your Whataboutism is a Fail, Bev.
