A Taxing Proposal

Earlier this week Americans awaited, the White House wondered and certain citizens cast their ballots, in a state election of far reaching scope, both in Massachusetts and nationally.

A nominal Republican candidate was selected to represent the Commonwealth in the US Senate, the selection of a party affiliate for senate in that state that had not occurred for four decades, mostly on the strength of the unaffiliated, independent voter.

His name: Scott Brown.


Brown said in his acceptance speech, I will work in the Senate to put government back on the side of people who create jobs, and the millions of people who need jobs - and starts with an across the board tax cut for individuals and businesses that will create jobs and stimulate the economy. It's that simple!

In those remarks he referenced another US Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who several decades ago echoed these same remarks:

It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. We need an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes.

He called high tax rates a danger to the very essence of the progress of a free society.

In the speech he was scheduled to deliver on Nov. 22, 1963, he planned to report proudly: We have proposed a massive tax reduction, with particular benefits for small business.

He never got that chance to utter those encouraging words; that very day his life was snuffed out. But you can hear first hand what that great Senator, later to become a great US President, had to say...and those words are nearly identical to those expressed this week by Scott Brown.




So much for rhetoric: can tax cuts really help an economy, or can the preferred solution in recent months of TARP relief, auto bailouts, stimulus packages, Cash for Clunkers...and Caulkers, and still more costly initiatives the federal government plans to roll out, be more effective?

Next week we will examine a extensive, hallmark study encompassing many decades of observation over many economically developed countries, an analysis by skilled economists who reveal much about the efficacy of large changes in fiscal policy from taxes and from spending to spur an economy.