When Arthur Laffer spoke on campus last week he made an interesting point about tax cuts. Three Presidents made the most significant tax cuts over the past half century. Your guesses on who they were?
OK, Reagan was the easy guess. And I'm sure many of you also guessed Kennedy, as the Republicans have used that bit of history in many of their own tax cut arguments. But the third one? According to Laffer, President Clinton gets third prize as a tax cutter and free trade advocate. Granted, this all happened after the Republicans took over Congress. But, the truth is that neither party has owned the pro-growth agenda over the long term.
Even now the Democrats are battling over whether they want to emerge with a pro-growth or with a redistribution-of-wealth agenda. James Pethokoukis writes about this battle in a column last week on "Wall Street Democrats."
However, the key to economic growth lies not on Wall Street, but on Main Street. Entrepreneurs are fueling our growth -- not the public corporations that dominated the previous century. Neither party seems to understand the economic transition going on in America today.
