Grantland so far

Malcolm Gladwell meet John F Kennedy:

"It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now ... Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus."

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president's news conference

 

Necessary=/=sufficient. You don't read about the people that are "complete SOBs when it came to matters of money" that failed. It doesn't mean they don't exist. Luck could be the difference.

 

Outliers

 

JFK was the tipping point when it came to marginal tax rates

 

"Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate."

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, message to Congress on tax reduction and reform, House Doc. 43, 88th Congress, 1st Session.

"It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government's policy"

/ Malcolm Gladwell

 

Actually, Kennedy lowered taxes because Walter Heller told him to.

http://www.slate.com/id/2093947/

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.

 

"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."

 

All of which still refutes Chris L's assertion that Gladwell was wrong.

The complaints of businessmen or the wealthy or even the general public weren't the reason for Kennedy's tax cut; Heller's "demand side" strategy to kickstart a sluggish economy was.

 

Proves nothing. The fact that Gladwell political commentary did not mention Kennedy tax cuts is a glaring omission.

 

No, it's not.

If the '64 cuts weren't motivated by the complaints of the wealthy - and we've just shown they weren't - the Kennedy tax reduction has no bearing on the point of Gladwell's last paragraph.

 

They may not have been . . . but you can see the Old Man's thinking in the alteration in policy . . . just as you saw the Old Man's mode of thinking in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

Exactly. Either way it was a tax cut that benefited the rich of which Joe Kennedy was a member.

Gladwell going political really taints what was a good article.