Who warned that "increasing federal expenditures" would "demoralize both the government and our economy"?
The unemployment rate that month was 5.5 percent. The annual inflation rate was 1.3 percent.
The minimum wage in 1962 was $1.15. For 50 weeks at 40 hours per week, that's $2,300 a year -- 79 percent of the price of a new Impala convertible.
The 1962 federal deficit $7.1 billion, more than double the $3.3 billion in federal red ink in 1961.
The $7.1 billion deficit was 1.3 percent of GDP. For 2012, the Office of Management and Budget projects that the federal deficit will hit 8.5 percent of GDP, over six times higher than in 1962, relative to the size of the economy.
President Kennedy began his address to the Economic Club of New York by stating that U.S. security is directly linked to the strength of the nation's economy.
National security "will not be determined by military or diplomatic moves alone," he stated. "It will be affected by the decisions of finance ministers as well as by the decisions of Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense, by the deployment of fiscal and monetary weapons as well as by military weapons, and, above all, by the strength of this nation's economy as well as by the strength of our defenses."
To strengthen the economy, Kennedy called tax cuts on business and all income groups, a less expansionary government, a simplified tax code that downsized loopholes and special privileges, and the removal of obstacles to private initiative.
The "most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand -- to cut the fetters which hold back private spending," he asserted.
In contrast, a course of "increasing federal expenditures more rapidly than necessary," he warned, "would soon demoralize both the government and our economy."
Kennedy called for "an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes" in order to reduce "the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our current tax system" -- a federal tax system that "exerts too heavy a drag on growth," "siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power," and "reduces the financial incentive for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking."
Kennedy's bottom line? "In short," he stated, "to increase demand and lift the economy, the federal government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the initiatives and opportunities for private expenditures."
And the impact of tax cuts on deficits? "Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other," he declared. The"paradoxical truth" is that "tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."
Those were the good old days, a time when Democrats and liberals understood that it's economic growth, not redistribution, that delivers overall increases in a nation's standard of living, across all income groups. Cont. Reading
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