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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat is ugly about the GOp trying to claim JFK.
It is funny to see the GOp try to claim JFK was closer to their side of the street. Yes, the so called "moderates" are very careful not to publicly slam JFK, RFK, or MLK; they leave that work to the Talk Radio goons and the people dressed in three corner hats at Tea Party Rallies. However, read what the GOp was saying about JFK, and the symmetry between their hate of that Catholic, liberal president and Obama is apparent. Both presidents had to deal with Dixie trying to wage the Civil War by other means, and both had the oligrachs heap hate upon them.
Let's face facts, the same GOP bastards that cry crocodile tears over JFK are the same bastards that would pop champagne if someone shot Barack Obama, just like they popped champagne 50 years ago today, wther they dare admit it or not.
kentuck
(111,110 posts)But they are full of shit if they think he would have agreed to cut it to 28%, as Reagan did. He was not a socialist but he sure as hell was not a tax-cutting conservative.
whathehell
(29,095 posts)It's absolutely balmy to imagine he'd be close to even Bill Clinton's ideology, let alone conservatives.
Chakab
(1,727 posts)N/T
whathehell
(29,095 posts)rufus dog
(8,419 posts)Obama was starting down this same path with corporate tax rates. Cutting rates by 20 percent is meaningless, closing the loopholes and having a higher effective rate is the key.
DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)When you take a look at what it was under Eisenhower, it seems almost impossble to imagine anything like Ike's rate would be even thought of today. Of course, those were the oh so liberal 1950's.
he probably would have strangled Clinton for his "welfare reform", and have Lyndon B. Johnson ready with a baseball bat for Bubba's knees if he failed to resotore a civilized tax rate.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Nothing Republicans have ever said burns me up more than their bald face lies about his economic policies.
The other night on CNN, another idiot pundit was still at it.
Truth: Tax Cuts in Camelot? ( January 2004 )
JFK lowered taxes, but supply-siders wrongly claim he's their patron saint.
Since the drive to pass Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in the 1980s, Republicans have often invoked John F. Kennedy as the patron saint of supply-side economics. For several years now, conservative groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Club for Growththe supply-side group whose name sounds like a hair-replacement outfithave used JFK's name and words to depict Republican tax cuts skewed toward the rich as part of a grand bipartisan tradition. (In 1997 in Slate, Democratic strategist Bob Shrum dissected one of these ads.) Now the Club for Growth's Stephen Moore is enlisting JFK to take a swipe at Howard Dean's economic vision in the Wall Street Journal, declaring it anti-growth, burdensome to the middle-class, and in an oh-so-painful concluding slap, final proof that the Democrats "no longer believe a word of John F. Kennedy's message of 40 years ago."
So, was Kennedy really a forerunner to Reagan and Bush? Or are supply-siders just cynically appropriating his aura? The Republicans are right, up to a point. Kennedy did push tax cuts, and his plan, which passed in February 1964, three months after his death, did help spur economic growth. But they're wrong to see the tax reduction as a supply-side cut, like Reagan's and Bush's; it was a demand-side cut. "The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy," said Arthur Okun, one of Kennedy's economic advisers.
This distinction, taught in Economics 101, seldom makes it into the Washington sound-bite wars. A demand-side cut rests on the Keynesian theory that public consumption spurs economic activity. Government puts money in people's hands, as a temporary measure, so that they'll spend it. A supply-side cut sees business investment as the key to growth. Government gives money to businesses and wealthy individuals to invest, ultimately benefiting all Americans. Back in the early 1960s, tax cutting was as contentious as it is today, but it was liberal demand-siders who were calling for the cuts and generating the controversy.
When Kennedy ran for president in 1960 amid a sluggish economy, he vowed to "get the country moving again." After his election, his advisers, led by chief economist Walter Heller, urged a classically Keynesian solution: running a deficit to stimulate growth. (The $10 billion deficit Heller recommended, bold at the time, seems laughably small by today's standards.) In Keynesian theory, a tax cut aimed at consumers would have a "multiplier" effect, since each dollar that a taxpayer spent would go to another taxpayer, who would in effect spend it againmeaning the deficit would be short-lived.
At first Kennedy balked at Heller's Keynesianism. He even proposed a balanced budget in his first State of the Union address. But Heller and his team won over the president. By mid-1962 Kennedy had seen the Keynesian light, and in January 1963 he declared that "the enactment this year of tax reduction and tax reform overshadows all other domestic issues in this Congress."
The plan Kennedy's team drafted had many elements, including the closing of loopholes (the "tax reform" Kennedy spoke of).Ultimately, in the form that Lyndon Johnson signed into law, it reduced tax withholding rates, initiated a new standard deduction, and boosted the top deduction for child care expenses, among other provisions. It did lower the top tax bracket significantly, although from a vastly higher starting point than anything we've seen in recent years: 91 percent on marginal income greater than $400,000. And he cut it only to 70 percent, hardly the mark of a future Club for Growth member.
Yet the Kennedy-Johnson team saw the supply-side effects of the bill as secondary, if not incidental, to its main goal of prodding near-term growth. "The tax cut is good for long-run growth," said James Tobin, another economist on JFK's team, "only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment." The immediate boost to the economy was the main goal. In fact, Nixon's economic adviser Herb Stein noted that the 1964 plan led to a diminished output-per-person-employeda fact that could argue against the supply-side tenet that lower marginal rates would unleash the productivity of workers deterred from working harder because of overtaxation.
Many liberals disliked Kennedy's plan on grounds of equity. Leon Keyserling, an economist who had served Harry Truman, lamented that the richest 12 percent of Americans would get 45 percent of the benefits. Michael Harrington, the scholar of poverty, called the plan "reactionary Keynesianism." The AFL-CIO came out against it.
That Kennedy had to rebut charges of unfairness from his left flank seems to lend credence to the supply-siders' analogy with Bush. But that analogy omits the additional fact that Kennedy's toughest opposition came from business. Corporate America distrusted Kennedy, especially after he took on the steel industry in 1962 for raising prices. A June 1962 poll showed that 88 percent of businessmen viewed him as hostile to them. Motivated by a mixture of traditional balanced-budget conservatism and personal distrust, many of them voiced opposition to the cuts.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2004/01/tax_cuts_in_camelot.html
polichick
(37,152 posts)when they probably considered it hippie shit back in the day.
RepubliCONS are just that, con men.
napkinz
(17,199 posts)I've never understood conservatives who claim they love the Beatles. I don't get it.
polichick
(37,152 posts)and can you imagine what Dubya said about rock when he was a cheerleader?
napkinz
(17,199 posts)I bet you know whose side he was on!
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)napkinz
(17,199 posts)zeemike
(18,998 posts)They coop things they fail to destroy and become mainstream.
Back in the day, Joe Scumbag probably listened to country and hated rock and roll...but because it did not die like he wanted he now pretends he was for it all along.
And BTW I lived in the city where he is from, and I know his kind well.
Pensacola Fla in the 60s and 70s was just as racist as Alabama...in fact they called the Panhandle of Florida LA, for Lower Alabama,,,and when I was sent there in the Navy in 64 it was my first experience with white and colored bathrooms.
whathehell
(29,095 posts)Maybe they were the kind of "Dixiecrats" who went repuke after the Civil Rights Movement.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)Probably not his family because it was a common name there, and they were as KKK as a KKKer can be.
So it is hard for me to buy his shit.
whathehell
(29,095 posts)You might be right...Interesting that Scarborough is a common name there...old WASPS, I guess.
The only Scarborough I heard of before him was that contained "Scarborough Fair".
He might be lying..He is an insufferable right wing blow-hard, that's for sure.
napkinz
(17,199 posts)A few years ago Bill Bennet gave a speech entitled "The Conservative Virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King."
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)Here->
In favor of universal healthcare ->
In favor of civil rights
MichiganVote
(21,086 posts)With one another and as a country. In terms of civil rights Kennedy was not the driver Johnson became.
stillcool
(32,626 posts)Civil rights was and is a process. Johnson may have been at the right place at the right time, but I can not imagine that he personally lifted a finger, until it was to his advantage politically.
MichiganVote
(21,086 posts)All of them have a great deal to lose. Johnson took more risks than Kennedy in this domain.
whathehell
(29,095 posts)He had been tried for it earlier and was opposed. It was passed largely out of respect for him after his assassination.
Cha
(297,712 posts)decide to grasp at claiming JFK as one of their own Straw.
They have to rewrite history in their own little minds because realistically they're junk.
Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)about how JFK would be a member of the Tea Party today.
I kid you not. Revisionist history is their specialty.
Like you said, these are the folks that were celebrating when JFK was killed and they'd be celebrating if Obama met the same fate.
ailsagirl
(22,899 posts)ForgoTheConsequence
(4,869 posts)Because we know how many Tea Partiers support European style universal health care, organized labor and civil rights........
n2doc
(47,953 posts)DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)Especially since the GOP would hate him because he is a CATHOLIC!!!
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)House, etc. Bad!
ailsagirl
(22,899 posts)You made good points
Botany
(70,589 posts)applegrove
(118,805 posts)Last edited Sat Nov 23, 2013, 01:28 AM - Edit history (2)
JFK is a liberal cornerstone and his murder just seared it into liberal's brains. The last thing the GOP wants to do is piss off people who were young, hopeful liberals in 1963. Many of whom are part of their aged base right now. I say we call them on their manipulation of this historical event. They hated JFK.
Gothmog
(145,619 posts)Kennedy was a Democrat and he would not be associated with today's GOP. Heck, even Reagan would not fit in with today's GOP.
The GOP keeps claiming that MLK would be a republican. That claim really makes me laugh
Seeking Serenity
(2,840 posts)I guess for them, that was enough.
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)Back in '63, there were still quite a few moderate Republicans who did mourn JFK's passing.....TBH, if anyone was popping the corks off their champagne en masse that day, it was probably the Birchers and the Dixiecrats, especially the Bull Connor/Lester Maddox types; both groups absolutely despised JFK, as could be seen here in the D/FW area not long before his death.
Blue Idaho
(5,057 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them."
--Remarks at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, CA, November 2 1960
kydo
(2,679 posts)But just remember this my friend ... I hate it when I get songs in my head, sorry.
Dixiecrats were and are bigots and racists in the south after the Civil War. Then they got mad at LBJ for the civil rights laws and started to switch party's. In the 70's they made up the so called silent majority. In the 80's they became the raygun democrats. DINO's They were the racist peeps that were either to lazy to officially change party's or they thought they were some how being smart by staying dem and voting rethug.
By the Clinton era Dixiecrats were now the conservative right wing in the republican party, (racist and bigots disguised in the coat of religion). These days Dixiecrats are now known as The Tea Party. Baggers! Yet still the same (damn oldies channel keeps putting songs in my head), racist and bigots.
The bigots and racists during JFK's time, the Dixiecrats, hated JFK. They are the ones that cheered his murder. They are also the ones that cheered Lincoln's murder.
Don't worry, the hate runs strong in this group and they won't be able to continue glorifying something they despise much longer. By turkey day they will be over it and back to their war on Christmas and hate for Obama.
Hopefully the republicans will toss this group of losers out soon. Make them be their own party. It would greatly diminish their power if they did.
randome
(34,845 posts)Peanut butter and jam. Cereal and milk. Wine and cheese.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Don't ever underestimate the long-term effects of a good night's sleep.[/center][/font][hr]
IronLionZion
(45,540 posts)Dem presidents have avoided that word since. Maybe the conspiracy folks take each president aside into a private room and show them what really happened to JFK to extort them?