Can We Repeat JFK’s Magic Tax Formula? | Larry Kudlow

Earners keepers? According to Larry Kudlow, there's a secret history behind the US's history of tax reduction and it involves John F. Kennedy. Kudlow's latest book is "JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity" ().
Read more at BigThink.com:
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube:
Facebook:
Twitter:
Transcript - The so-called liberal argument, which is probably more liberal today than it has been in many, many decades, they argue that we should have equality. Everybody should be equal. We should all make the same amount of money. We should all have the same assets and wealth. I don't believe that. I think that's fundamentally inimical to free market capitalism. I think that's a kind of Soviet East Europe old communist socialist model that has never worked. You can't make everybody equal. They tried to redistribute income and wealth rather than increase it. My credo here is instead of making the economic pie smaller and handing smaller pieces to everyone, let's make the pie bigger and get everybody a larger piece. And I think history has proven, really since the fall of Soviet communism, that that model of income leveling is a bad model. It's a model that doesn't work. It took seventy years for the Soviets to fall but they fell.
And China, for example, the other big communist country, I won't say that they have fallen but they've changed their economy. It's now much more of a market oriented economy. In my judgment markets distributes goods. Markets set prices. And if there are free opportunities inside markets that's how people who work hard will do well. And I think the ethos in America is to work hard. That's always been where we are. In other words we all start at the same beginning, the starting line is the same. By law and tradition we should be prejudice free, color free, gender free, whatever. We all have the same legal starting line, but that doesn't mean we all finish at the finish line at the same and I think that's human nature. So we talk about this in the book, and in particular as you asked about tax policy, taxing rich people- at high confiscatory rates has never worked in this country. It's outside of our tradition. It's been tried a couple of times. F.D.R. tried it in the 1930s and it didn't work. Economy was no better in the late '30s than it was when he took over in 1932. The war spending did help, but the great new deal experiment failed. Read Full Transcript Here: .