Kennedy’s New Frontier: Tax Cuts and Wage Policy

This chapter will investigate Kennedy’s approach to economics through a review of speeches he made and his Economic Reports. In his first Economic Report, he used the hybrid system of redistributive economics to formulate policies to end the recession that he inherited as president. When those policies did not cause the economy to grow fast enough, Kennedy evolved his policies to a tax cut that was a combination of Keynesian economics and conservative supply-side thinking.

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Notes

American Federationist, 1954a, pp. 5–6; Brown, 1954, pp. 10–11. See also Shishkin, 1954a, p. 4; 1954b, pp. 3–4; Meany, 1954, p. 14.

Meany, 1956a, pp. 4–5; 1956b, pp. 16–17; Cruikshank, 1956a, pp. 7–9; 1956b, pp. 20–21; Gray, 1956, p. 11.

Kennedy, 1960d. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury, Douglas Dillon, doubted that the speech, which was published in The New York Times, was ever delivered. Dillon, 1985, p. 128.

CEA, 1962, pp. 44–47. The estimate of four percent unemployment as kept inflation in check was consistent with an estimate derived from a Phillips curve for the USA by Samuelson and Solow, 1960, pp. 191–192.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Economics, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD, USA Donald R. Stabile

1. Donald R. Stabile