Morton Kondracke fired off a letter to Powerline Blog, criticizing a New York Times review of the book he recently co-authored with TWS executive editor Fred Barnes: Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America.
Here’s an excerpt:
I feared that The New York Times would assign a Reagan-hater to review Jack Kemp: The Bleeding Heart Conservative Who Changed America. Mercifully, it didn’t pick Paul Krugman, who would have been savage. Instead, it chose Tim Noah, now of Politico, whose review is polite, just misguided.
First thing, he labels both me and co-author Fred Barnes “right of center,” which Fred definitely is, but I’m not. “Mushy moderate” is Fred’s characterization of me. Moderate Independent is what I call myself. He gets it wrong that Kemp passed his tax bill in 1978; it didn’t happen til 1981. He has Kemp serving as HHS Secretary under Bush 1; it was HUD. And he dismisses Kemp, whose life and political career were devoted to ideas, optimism, growth, civil rights and fighting poverty, as proof that “nice guys finish last.” That’s to throw cold water on the idea that Kemp could be (as we hope) a model for ever-warring contemporary politicians.
But the big policy beef I have with the review is the assertion that Kemp’s signal achievement—the across-the-board supply-side tax cut proposal (“Kemp-Roth”) that became the basis of Reaganomics– “was a disaster.”
According to Noah, “it inaugurated two decades of sky-high budget deficits, accelerated a nascent growth trend in income inequality and did (depending on who you ask) little or nothing to ease the brutal 16-month recession that began around the same time the bill was passed.”
Noah systematically ignores the great economic turn-around in that Reagan achieved in the 1980s, using Kemp-Roth and then the 1986 tax reform partially developed by Kemp. He barely refers to the pre-Reagan 1970s — the era of “stagflation,” the “misery index” (unemployment up to 9 percent and inflation, 13.5 percent) and growth rates averaging 1.6 percent per year (vs. the post-war norm of 3.6 percent.)
First thing, he labels both me and co-author Fred Barnes “right of center,” which Fred definitely is, but I’m not. “Mushy moderate” is Fred’s characterization of me. Moderate Independent is what I call myself. He gets it wrong that Kemp passed his tax bill in 1978; it didn’t happen til 1981. He has Kemp serving as HHS Secretary under Bush 1; it was HUD. And he dismisses Kemp, whose life and political career were devoted to ideas, optimism, growth, civil rights and fighting poverty, as proof that “nice guys finish last.” That’s to throw cold water on the idea that Kemp could be (as we hope) a model for ever-warring contemporary politicians.
But the big policy beef I have with the review is the assertion that Kemp’s signal achievement—the across-the-board supply-side tax cut proposal (“Kemp-Roth”) that became the basis of Reaganomics– “was a disaster.”
According to Noah, “it inaugurated two decades of sky-high budget deficits, accelerated a nascent growth trend in income inequality and did (depending on who you ask) little or nothing to ease the brutal 16-month recession that began around the same time the bill was passed.”
Noah systematically ignores the great economic turn-around in that Reagan achieved in the 1980s, using Kemp-Roth and then the 1986 tax reform partially developed by Kemp. He barely refers to the pre-Reagan 1970s — the era of “stagflation,” the “misery index” (unemployment up to 9 percent and inflation, 13.5 percent) and growth rates averaging 1.6 percent per year (vs. the post-war norm of 3.6 percent.)
Read the whole thing here.
