Massachusetts state Sen. Scott Brown, the underdog Republican candidate in the special election for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, has a new ad that ties him to the Kennedy legacy. To be specific, Brown is linking himself to the John F. Kennedy legacy, using the common depiction by modern Republicans of President Kennedy as a supply-side conservative.
The ad opens with footage of Kennedy proposing a tax cut in 1963 1962, and then fades into Brown reciting the words of Kennedy’s speech about how tax cuts will spur growth:
Besides the obvious joke that Scott Brown is no Jack Kennedy, it should be noted that any tax cut being proposed today is no Kennedy tax cut (or more properly a “Kennedy-Johnson” tax cut, since it was proposed by Kennedy but not enacted into law until LBJ came into office), and the circumstances are wildly different. At the time of the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts, the top marginal income tax rate was over 90%, which was then lowered to 70 percent. By modern conservative standards, this would be considered a tyrannical socialist regime plotting to confiscate all private property.
Today, the current top federal income tax rate is 36%. If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the upper brackets, the top rate will be 39%. Even if the Democrats were to propose increasing the top income taxes beyond that, it’s hard to imagine them going anywhere near the tax rates of the Kennedy-Johnson era.
