America can return to prosperity and robust economic growth by looking to the Kennedy-Reagan model of income tax cuts and a strong, stable dollar, a new book argues. JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity, by Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic, will be published this week by Penguin Random House’s Portfolio imprint. It tells the story of how the tax and monetary policies of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan triggered impressive economic growth.
As Kudlow and Domitrovic describe it in their introduction, “the combination of a strong and stable dollar with big, permanent, across-the-board tax rate cuts” can lead to a near-utopia. “Budget deficits, the retirement crisis, student loans, unaffordable health care, poor schools, [problems of] inner cities—all these things will fade away as lasting economic growth takes hold.”
There are some things that are different, however. They were both doing a huge buildup of the military. Today, we’ve already got a huge military. Also, their national debts were significantly smaller (as a percentage of GDP) than we have today.
That said, there are great lessons to be learned from both JFK and Reagan in how to create growth for a country.
Via Reason Magazine