Two
days after the death of GOP icon Jack Kemp, Newsweek Senior Editor
Michael Hirsh posted a classless obituary on Monday, "The Dangers of
Amateurism," calling the football player, politician, and self-taught
economist Kemp an "amateur econo-cultist."
[This item, by the MRC's Clay Waters, was posted Thursday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org [1] ]
An excerpt:
One does
not want to be disrespectful of the dead, and Jack Kemp was an
admirable man in many ways. If the Republican Party had only followed
his advice about reaching out to the inner cities and underclass - and
ignored his happy talk about supply-side economics - the GOP might not
be in nearly the fix it is today. Unfortunately the opposite happened.
Kemp, a consummate professional as a football player, was a classic
case of an amateur econo-cultist whose understanding never reached
quite deep enough. In mid-life, when he decided to switch from sports
to politics, Kemp became enamored of simplistic free-market ideas, in
particular a toxic combination of Arthur Laffer and Ayn Rand. He then
sold another gifted amateur, Ronald Reagan, on the idea that drastic
tax cuts would so stimulate the economy that the ensuing growth would
more than make up for the loss in revenues....Kemp was such an economic
purist - i.e., amateur - that he argued with Reagan himself a number
of times when the president decided that perhaps he'd cut taxes enough.
END of Excerpt
For Hirsh's May 4 post: blog.newsweek.com [2]
By
the way, Reagan's "drastic tax cuts" of 1981 amounted to a 25%
across-the-board cut in personal marginal tax rates - a healthy cut,
but hardly apocalyptic. After all, tax revenues continued to rise
throughout the Reagan years, despite the reduction in tax rates.
And
speaking of amateurism - what are Al Gore's environmental science
credentials again? Gore has no scientific training or background; he is
a self-taught activist in his field, just like Kemp was. But Hirsh, far
from criticizing Gore's environmental amateurism, lamented in a
December 2007 post that Gore would not be running for the 2008
presidency: "Why isn't Al Gore - Nobel laureate and enviro rock star,
embodiment of the alternative history that never was, winner of the
largest popular-vote total in U.S. presidential history (at the time)
- seeking the job that many people still think should have been his in
2000?" See: www.newsweek.com [3]
Hirsh concluded his Kemp tribute by portraying today's "economic
disaster" as the most enduring part of Kemp's legacy: "All of which
brings us up to the present economic disaster, which now includes what
is the largest projected budget deficit since World War II. It's not
fair to blame Jack Kemp, who died over the weekend, for all this - and
I don't - but it is fair to say that this is the Kemp legacy that will
likely remain with us the longest. It's the missing piece you didn't
see in the obits."
Classy.