Jack Kemp - A Dissenting View

Jerry Taylor writes:

It sure would be nice if tax cuts alone could deliver all of the wonders advertised by Jack Kemp, but alas, that proved not to be the case. Tax cuts in lieu of spending cuts neither starved the beast nor made government more affordable. It proved politically popular (for a while at least), but it simply transferred wealth from the future to the present and put the first nail (of many to come) in the coffin of the political movement launched by Barry Goldwater. Jack Kemp was not simply unenthusiastic about budget cutting; he was positively hostile to it.

While Jack Kemp’s many speeches in defense of capitalism and entrepreneurship were often inspiring, he never understood what Milton Friedman spent a lifetime patiently explaining: that government spending was the true tax on the private sector. One way or another, all federal dollars come from the private (productive) sector. They might be taxed away, of course, but they might also be borrowed (meaning that taxpayers tomorrow will pay for spending today . . . with interest!) or confiscated indirectly via the printing press (that is, via inflation).