Does anyone take Charles Krauthammer seriously? Can your columnist really believe that, if President Kennedy cut the highest marginal tax rate from 91 to 65 percent, this proves that he would therefore endorse cutting this rate from 39.6 to 33 percent? If a man is helped by swallowing two aspirin tablets, by Krauthammer's logic, he would be helped a lot more by swallowing 200 aspirin tablets.
Two features of President Kennedy's tax cut policy are conspicuously absent from President Bush's proposal. One is the closing of tax loopholes, ignored in the current White House offering. The other is JFK's concern for Americans too poor to pay income tax. In November 1963, musing about the 1964 state-of-the-union message, he said to me, "The time has come to organize a national assault on the causes of poverty." He told Walter Heller, his chairman of the Council of the Economic Advisers, "First we'll have your tax cut; then we'll have my expenditures program."
As JFK saw it, the war on poverty was an integral part of the tax reduction policy. The administration proposal, far from showing concern for poor Americans, is based on the old trickle-down theory — stuff the rich, and a few crumbs will trickle down to the poor.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
New York, N.Y.