Me and Jack Kemp

The Origins of the Kemp-Roth-Reagan Tax Cut

My first real job in Washington was working for Congressman Ron Paul, whose staff I joined in May 1976. He was elected in a special election in April 1976 and had to run for re-election that same year. Unfortunately, he was defeated and I had to look for another job. I ended up working for Congressman Jack Kemp, for whom I was the staff economist, working mainly on tax issues. My major project was developing the Kemp-Roth tax cut, which was endorsed by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and enacted by Congress in August 1981. This article is from an unpublished memoir I wrote in 2013 with links added. BB

After Ron Paul was defeated in November 1976, everyone on the staff was immediately looking for a job except Gary North, who was happy to get out of Washington as fast as he could. But it was tough because friends tend not to return your calls when they know your boss was just beaten, since they assume you are job hunting.

Nothing much developed for me until early December, when a woman on the staff said she heard that Jack Kemp was looking for a staff economist. I didn’t know much about him except that he was a former pro football player who cultivated a moderate image (Gannon 1976). As someone more in tune with Ron Paul’s radical point of view at that time, this didn’t especially endear me to Kemp. But a job was a job.

I remember it was a late Friday afternoon when I called Kemp’s office to inquire about the position. I spoke to Randy Teague, Kemp’s chief of staff. I knew Randy’s name because he had been executive director of YAF when I was in college. He told me he left YAF to work with Howard Phillips in his failed attempt to abolish the Office of Economic Opportunity during the Nixon administration.

Randy later told me that when he and Phillips got to OEO they were anxious to find any potential allies among the staff. So they put out the word that there was going to be a reduction in force and all the department managers should submit names of expendable staff. They got a list of every Republican working at OEO. Phillips called them into his office and told them they were now in charge.

I asked Randy about the Kemp job and he said that they had been interviewing people for some time and had narrowed the list down to two people. A final decision would probably be made the following week. I said it wouldn’t cost him anything to look at my resume and he said I should put it in the inside mail.

The following Tuesday, I got a call from Kemp’s secretary, Janet, who said Kemp wanted to see me that day. I went by his office around four while he was putting on a tuxedo. He said it was for the last state dinner of the Ford administration.

We chitchatted for a while and then Kemp asked me if I was a “supply side fiscalist.” (The term was coined by the economist Herb Stein in April 1976. See Stein 1984: 241.) Well, I had never heard that phrase before in my life and I had no idea what he was talking about, so naturally I said yes I was, wasn’t everybody? I suppose it was the right answer because Kemp ran off and Randy and I went out for pizza, where he questioned me further about various things. At the end, I was offered the job.

Only after I had the job did I really learn what I was in for. I was replacing Paul Craig Roberts, a well-known conservative economist whose work I was familiar with. His books on Marxism and the Soviet Union had received high praise in conservative publications (Roberts 1971a, 1971b; Roberts & Stephenson 1973). I didn’t realize he had been working on Capitol Hill.

Although Craig had a Ph.D. in economics, he had been hired by Kemp to work on defense policy. As the ranking Republican on the defense appropriations subcommittee, Kemp was deeply involved in national security issues. He also got a staff slot from the Appropriations Committee, which he used to hire Craig. (Craig’s Appropriations slot was taken by Bill Schneider, who held very high-level positions at OMB and State during the Reagan administration.)

Randy told me that Kemp had been a big supporter of the Vietnam war and this was a major focus of his attention after his election to Congress in 1970. Kemp always said that the reason he was elected is because he threatened to come back and play for the Buffalo Bills for another year if he lost.

Kemp Turns to Economy

By 1974, the war was over and the economy was the nation’s number one problem. Kemp turned his attention to it, introducing his first major piece of economic legislation, a bill to restrict growth of the money supply to fight inflation. This was pure monetarism based on Milton Friedman’s idea that the Federal Reserve should increase the money supply by a fixed percentage yearly, come hell or high water.

Table 1 is a list of Kemp’s economic legislation and major statements in the years before I joined his staff in December 1976 that Randy prepared for me, which I have edited a bit. I added references to some of the speeches Jack used to hand out to people – reprints were a big business in his office – so I assume he thought they were especially important. Kemp handed out so many reprints of speeches and articles that he actually had his own printing press, which the male interns quickly learned to operate as they cycled through the office.

As one can see, there was a gradual evolution in Kemp’s thinking, starting out as a conventional conservative, but eventually adopting unconventional conservative positions. For example, in the 1970s, it was widely believed by both liberals and conservatives that excessive economic growth and an unemployment rate that was too low were inherently inflationary. This view was enshrined in something called the Phillips Curve, which showed that there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment – the higher one was, the lower the other would be (for example, see Silk 1978).

By 1975, Kemp had rejected the Phillips Curve and the idea that economic growth was inflationary. This put him well outside the economic mainstream, including among conservatives. But his focus at that time was almost entirely on giving incentives to corporations to invest, which would lead to noninflationary growth and increase jobs.

Randy told me there wasn’t a great deal of analysis underlying the particular tax provisions in Kemp’s various bills during this period. Since Kemp wasn’t a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee there wasn’t much he could do to actually enact tax legislation, nor did he have easy access to the tax experts at the Joint Committee on Taxation, whose first priority was to members of the Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees.

Table 1

History of Economic Legislation and Major Speeches by Jack Kemp, 1971-76

Source: Congressional Record

Randy hit on the idea of getting big corporations and trade associations to lobby for Kemp’s legislation. The Business Roundtable had been established in 1972 to increase the clout of big businesses in legislative debates, and many corporations were becoming increasingly active as well, establishing Washington offices for the first time, hiring lobbyists and so on. Today we take this for granted, but in the 1970s it was a new thing.

Teague simply asked various corporations and trade groups for their “wish list” of tax legislation and built Kemp’s early tax bills around them. The idea was that business lobbyists would do the heavy lifting of getting visibility for the legislation and make it viable, legislatively.

By the time I got to Kemp’s office, his principal economic legislation was the Jobs Creation Act (JCA), cosponsored with Senator Jim McClure of Idaho. It was often called the Kemp-McClure bill and had 14 provisions including a cut in the corporate tax rate, an increase in the Investment Tax Credit, tax credits for increased saving by individuals, larger depreciation allowances and other business-oriented tax cuts.

The Business Roundtable contracted with the consulting economist Norman Ture to analyze the economic effects of JCA. His analysis showed an overwhelming impact, so great that federal revenues would actually increase. I never saw the original Ture study, but was told that it all appeared in an American Enterprise Institute study. Table 2 shows Ture’s results.

Table 2

Economic Effects of the Jobs Creation Act

(dollar amounts in billions of 1974 dollars)

Source: AEI 1976: 31

The version of JCA that Randy gave me to work on had been revised from the previous Congress. Kemp wanted something in the new version that would help individuals and added a 10 percent across the board reduction in statutory tax rates. Subsequently, that was the element of the legislation that he talked about pretty much to the exclusion of all the other provisions. This diminished business support for the legislation, but improved its political popularity at a time when bracket-creep caused by inflation was raising effective tax rates rapidly. Kemp often said that a big tax cut was needed just to keep taxes from rising (Congressional Record 1977b).

According to the Tax Policy Center, the average federal income tax rate (taxes divided by income, not including payroll taxes) for a family with the median income (the exact center of the income distribution) rose from 7.1 percent in 1965 to 9.9 percent in 1976. It would continue to rise to 10.4 percent in 1977 and 11.1 percent in 1978.

Additionally, the marginal tax rate (the tax on each additional dollar earned) rose from 17 percent in 1965 to 22 percent in 1976 and 1977, and 25 percent in 1978. The cause was inflation. As workers got cost-of-living adjustments, they were pushed into higher tax brackets even though their real income had not risen.

The Supply-Side Gang

Eventually, I learned that the two people I had beaten out for the job in Kemp’s office were Stuart Sweet and Jan Olson, both of whom were more qualified than I was. Stu had a MBA from the University of Chicago, where he had studied with the economist Arthur Laffer, and Jan had handled economic policy for Senator Jim Buckley of New York, who had been defeated in the 1976 election. (I believe that Jan wrote the AEI study, although she is uncredited.)

I’ve asked Randy a couple of times over the years why he hired me and not one of them. He has always demurred. I suspect that Stu’s Laffer connection and Jan’s Buckley connection might have made them a bit too independent for his taste. My virtue was that I really didn’t know a damn thing about tax policy and not much about economics, either. Hence, I was more reliant on Randy’s guidance and direction than they would have been.

It didn’t really matter much as things developed. Stu got a job doing economic policy for newly-elected Rep. David Stockman of Michigan. Dave had been on the congressional staff for some years as an aide to Rep. John B. Anderson of Illinois, chairman of the House Republican Conference and the third ranking Republican in the House.

Stockman was so close to Kemp that he was virtually an adjunct member of the staff. Randy told me that Stockman told Kemp he wanted to work for him if he lost his congressional race. Even after he became a member of Congress, Stockman still acted like a de facto Kemp staffer and Stu and I worked closely together for as long as we were on Capitol Hill.

Jan went to work for incoming Senator S.I. Hayakawa of California. He was extremely well known for his run-ins with campus demonstrators while president of San Francisco State College. Hayakawa was also an expert on semantics and knew how to give good quote, as they say in Washington. Consequently, he got an enormous amount of press attention whenever he wanted it. This was very helpful to the cause.

Hayakawa’s wit was on full display in an article he wrote for Harper’s magazine about the insanity of assigning him to the Senate Budget Committee when he couldn’t even balance his own checkbook. But he soon discovered, it wasn’t as hard as it looked.

The numbers you work with on this committee turned out to be very simple. You are always dealing in hundreds of millions – or billions. Therefore, when we say 1.0, that means $1 billion. Then we have .1; that means $100 million – and that’s the smallest figure we ever deal with in the Budget Committee.

A member of the committee will say, for instance, “Here’s an appropriation for such-and-such. It was 1.7 for 1977. So for the 1978 budget we ought to make it 2.9.” So all we do is add 1.2; that’s not hard. The next item is 2.5. The members discuss it back and forth, and someone says, “Let’s raise it to 3.7.” They look around at each other. “Everybody in favor?” “Yes, sir. Okay.” So in five minutes we have disposed of 2 billion bucks – 2 billion, not 2 million. I never realized it could be so easy. It’s all simple addition. You don’t even have to know subtraction (Hayakawa 1978: 39).

Craig Roberts, meanwhile, was now on the House Budget Committee staff. He told me he thought it offered a better opportunity to influence policy because the Budget Act of 1974 required Congress to adopt an annual budget resolution spelling out aggregate spending and revenues. Since tax cuts could not be considered without a provision in the budget resolution, it provided an ideal opportunity to debate the economic effects of tax policy (Roberts 1984: 7-33).

One of the keys to using the budget resolution as a forum for debating tax cuts was that there could be a discussion about the complex interrelationship between taxes and the economy and the subsequent revenue feedback effects.

Historically, Congress had not always bothered with revenue estimates. Taxes were often raised or cut without them. When estimates were prepared, they were done on a strict accounting basis – a 10 percent cut in tax rates would reduce revenues by exactly 10 percent – and only for one year. Estimating the out-year effects was impossibly difficult until computers began being used in the policy process in the 1970s.

Recognizing its need for better data, Congress established the Congressional Budget Office when the congressional budget process was established in 1974. CBO was charged with making 5-year estimates of the effects of tax and spending changes. Moreover, it attempted to incorporate the economic effects of such changes on the economy and to integrate those effects in its budgetary estimates.

To do this, CBO made use of macroeconomic models created by private companies such as Data Resources, Inc. (DRI). These models had thousands of mathematical equations designed to represent different sectors of the economy, and were all linked together so that one could see the impact of a change in one sector on other sectors.

These models were very useful to businesses needing to know, for example, how an increase in home sales would affect demand for lumber, dishwashers and so on. My sister worked with DRI when she was with a large paper company. She told me that DRI would ask its clients for internal estimates of production and sales in order to make its model more accurate.

My sister’s company was happy to do so because it was thereby able to infer important business data from its competitors. It knew that its competitors were also DRI clients. Knowing the production and sales data her company had given to DRI gave it insight into its competitors’ sales and pricing plans. For example, if my sister’s company was projecting a price of $100 per ton for some product and DRI was projecting a price of $110, it was likely because its competitors were planning to increase the price even more. Thus it was an indirect method of price collusion without violating the antitrust laws.

The point is that these models were not built to analyze public policy, but were nevertheless pressed into doing so by CBO. There were a lot of problems with this, which became a key focus of the emerging supply-side view (Congressional Record 1977a: 6835-36). Supply-siders argued that tax rate reductions wouldn’t lose nearly as much revenue as standard revenue-estimating methods showed because they would stimulate growth. And as Ture’s estimates showed, the stimulus might be so great that there would be no net loss in revenue even in year one.

The Kennedy Model

Critical to the development of this tax-cuts-won’t-lose-revenue idea was a memorandum that Kemp received from the Congressional Research Service on August 3, 1976. He had asked for data on the estimated revenue loss from the 1964 tax cut – which reduced the top tax rate from 91 percent to 70 percent and the bottom rate from 20 percent to 14 percent – and actual revenue collections. The tax cut had been proposed by John F. Kennedy in 1963, but not enacted until 1964 under Lyndon Johnson (Bartlett 2013, 2014). We always called it the “Kennedy tax cut.” Table 3 shows the data Kemp received. (I reprinted the entire CRS memo in Bartlett 1981: 213-14.)

Table 3

Estimated Revenue Loss and Actual Revenue Gain, 1963-67

(billions of dollars)

We used this table so often that I could recite the numbers in my sleep. Its purpose was to imply that tax cuts could actually increase federal revenues. But of course it didn’t actually show that because we didn’t know what the projections for federal revenues were in the absence of the tax cut. For all we knew, federal revenues would have been higher by the amount of the revenue loss without the tax cut. However, a 1978 report by the House Budget Committee and the Joint Economic Committee found revenues modestly exceeded projections, and a 1981 CBO report examined Treasury revenue estimates and found that federal revenues came in well above forecast during the 1964-67 period, which at least partially proved Kemp’s point (Congressional Budget Office 1981: 4).

Nevertheless, the CRS data were a powerful selling point for JCA. Combined with the Ture estimate, we often argued that Congress could enact it without needing a provision in the budget resolution because it wouldn’t lose net revenue (Congressional Record 1977a, 1977b. See also Wanniski 1976).

With the Kennedy tax cut being such an important part of our argument for JCA, I spent much of my time on Kemp’s staff doing historical research on it – giving me some value from my education after all. I believe I was the first one in the group to discover Kennedy’s Economic Club of New York speech on December 14, 1962, in which he made a powerful supply-side argument for his tax cut:

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records.

In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country’s own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.

I repeat: our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve—and I believe this can be done—a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.

Of course, there was a considerable amount of pushback against Kemp’s assertion that the Kennedy tax cut actually raised revenues, so I was quite excited when I heard that the economist Walter Heller, who had chaired the Council of Economic Advisers for Kennedy, was scheduled to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on February 7, 1977. I was in the hearing room when Senator Jacob Javits of New York asked Heller about the revenue effects of the tax cut, referencing the CRS data that Kemp had put into the Congressional Record.

Senator Javits. I wanted to ask this question: We have had a set of figures developed by the Library of Congress which were published in the Congressional Record January 4, 1977, on page 1432, which analyzed the tax revenues after the tax rate cuts of 1964 and which indicate a uniform pattern growing right through from 1963 to 1968 inclusive, which were years of actual revenue gains. There were rate cuts producing gains instead of losses even though some of the rate cuts were very, very high. Some of those occurred in the Kennedy years. I wonder, Mr. Heller, whether you have studied them?

Mr. Heller. What happened to the tax cut in 1965 is difficult to pin down but insofar as we are able to isolate it, it did seem to have a tremendously stimulative effect, a multiplied effect on the economy. It was the major factor that led to our running a $3 billion surplus by the middle of 1965 before escalation in Vietnam struck us. It was a $12 billion tax cut which would be about $33 or $34 billion in today’s terms, and within one year the revenues into the federal Treasury were already above what they had been before the tax cut…. Did it pay for itself in increased revenues? I think the evidence is very strong that it did (Joint Economic Committee 1977: 161. See also Heller 1967, 1968, 1981).

I was incredibly excited when I heard this. Here was irrefutable proof straight from the horse’s mouth that the Kennedy tax cut paid for itself. People could continue to argue about whether a similar sort of tax cut would have the same effect a decade later in a different economic environment, but at least we were on firm ground in asserting that the Kennedy tax cut paid for itself.

With all of this emphasis on the Kennedy tax cut, it was probably inevitable that Kemp would be drawn toward the simple idea of just replicating it. My recollection is that one morning, out of the blue, Jack stuck his head in the door of my office and told me to draft a bill along those lines. I said okay and got right on it.

It was immediately clear that replicating the Kennedy tax cut required some thought since, obviously, the economy and tax structure were different. I set about asking various people such as Craig Roberts and others what sort of tax cut would effectively replicate the Kennedy tax cut in 1977.

Norman Ture

The person who was most helpful to me was Ture. I’m not sure to what extent I realized at the time that he had been intimately involved in creating the original Kennedy tax cut; I knew him mainly because of his study of JCA. It may not have been until after he died in 1997 that I learned the full extent of his experience.

Briefly, Norm had been on the staff of the JEC and one of its members was Wilbur Mills, the longtime chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Mills used Ture as his staff economist (Zelizer 1998: 105-8). Ture also had a connection to Kennedy through his involvement with a task force he appointed after the 1960 election to recommend measures to increase economic growth (Nossiter 1961).

It appears from recordings Kennedy made of Oval Office meetings that the tax cut originated from a meeting with Mills on August 6, 1962. This led Kennedy to call a meeting with his economic advisers on August 10 at which the idea of a permanent tax rate reduction was further developed. Kennedy was attracted to the idea that conservatives would have difficulty opposing it despite their opposition to budget deficits. It was Keynesian economics with a conservative twist (Naftali 2001: 234-84). Indeed, the conservatism of the Kennedy tax cut is why his economic tutor at Harvard, John Kenneth Galbraith, then on leave as ambassador to India, strenuously opposed it (Galbraith 1969: 331). This advice was private, but upon returning to Harvard, Galbraith went on record with his negative view of the tax cut. As he told the Joint Economic Committee (1965: 13):

I was never as enthusiastic as many of my fellow economists over the tax reduction of last year. The case for it as an isolated action was undoubtedly good. But there was danger that conservatives, once introduced to the delights of tax reduction, would like it too much.

Tax reduction would then become a substitute for increased outlays on urgent social needs. We would then have a new and reactionary form of Keynesianism with which to contend.

I later learned that Ture wrote much of the speech that Mills gave on September 24, 1963 in defense of the Kennedy tax cut (Kudlow & Domitrovic 2016: 138). Mills even said it would raise revenues – proof of Ture’s influence:

I have reached the conclusion that this bill will provide a sufficient increase in the gross national product so that the larger revenues derived from this additional income will result the federal budget being balanced sooner than would be the case in the absence of this tax cut.

Mr. Chairman, there is no doubt in my mind that this tax reduction bill, in and of itself, can bring about an increase in the gross national product of approximately $50 billion in the next few years. If it does, these lower rates of taxation will bring in at least $12 billion in additional revenue (Congressional Record 1963: 17907).

Note: $12 billion in 1964 would be equivalent to about $300 billion today.

At some point, everyone seemed to agree that reducing the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and the bottom rate from 14 percent to 8 percent roughly duplicated the Kennedy tax cut. We simply asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to calculate an equivalent cut for all the rates in between. Randy just cut and pasted the computer printout into the actual bill.

While we were talking about the Kennedy tax cut bill, Kemp got a note from Senator Bill Roth of Delaware praising him for some speech Kemp had recently given and suggesting that they work together. We didn’t know much about Roth, but we liked that he was a member of the Senate Finance Committee who also cultivated a moderate image. Moreover, we felt that Jim McClure hadn’t done much to promote JCA, so we asked Roth if he was interested in being the Senate sponsor of the Kennedy bill and he was.

The deal was finalized at a lunch in the Senate dining room in late February 1977. My counterpart on Roth’s staff was Bruce Thompson and we worked closely together afterwards (Smith 1988: 289). I recall that Ture was also present. Roth’s main concern was that we should phase-in the tax cut to minimize the static revenue cost. Kemp was resistant, but after I pointed out that the Kennedy tax cut had been phased-in over two years, he agreed. Roth also didn’t want the bottom rate cut so much because the revenue loss was so large since every taxpayer paid some taxes at that rate. Kemp agreed to raise the proposed bottom rate from 8 percent to 10 percent.

The Kemp-Roth tax bill was introduced on July 14, 1977 to little fanfare. As I recall, there was only one real reporter in the room where Kemp and Roth held a press conference announcing their bill – from the principal Delaware newspaper. There were at most two dozen people in the room including staff. No one in the room imagined that the legislation would be enacted into law almost exactly four years later.

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