ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jack Kemp in 1964 as quarterback for the Buffalo Bills.COMMENTARY:
Arguably, without Jack Kemp, the Reagan supply-side, high-growth economic revolution would never have occurred. Mr. Kemp, a young congressman from Buffalo, N.Y., convinced Ronald Reagan and much of the nation of the wisdom of sharply cutting tax rates on labor and capital.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he wisely endorsed a bill - the Kemp-Roth Act - to cut income tax rates 30 percent across the board. It was a radical idea, but it worked so well that not even President Obama is proposing a return to the 70 percent marginal tax rate that existed in 1980.
Jack Kemp was a very successful quarterback for the Buffalo Bills who then was elected to Congress. Mr. Kemp was a natural-born leader. He had a forceful physical presence and a quick intellect, and was a gifted orator.
At that time, Republicans were mired in an uninspiring debate about how much to cut the budget rather than how to reignite economic growth and job creation. Mr. Kemp intuitively understood that just cutting budgets was neither a political nor economic winner for the Republicans or the country.
As the son of parents who built a successful small trucking company, Jack Kemp understood the difficulties entrepreneurs face in building any business, and that destructive tax and regulatory policies can become insurmountable hurdles for most.
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Kemp assembled a group of highly talented economists and economic writers for advice and ideas. The group included Robert Mundell, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, and Art Laffer of the Laffer Curve fame. Norman Ture, Paul Craig Roberts, Steve Entin and Bruce Bartlett were advisers who later served as officials of the U.S. Treasury. Bob Bartley, who was editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Jude Wanniski of the Journals editorial page were also key advisers.
Despite an absence of formal education in economics, Mr. Kemp had been reading economic textbooks and studies and became an intense and incisive questioner of his advisers in order to formulate his own ideas and clarify his thoughts. Mr. Laffer was teaching at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles in the late 1970s. He would occasionally take the "red-eye" into Washington, arriving at about 5:30 a.m., and I would pick him up at Dulles Airport and take him to Mr. Kemp's home in Bethesda. There, Jack, dressed in his bathrobe, would cook breakfast for us while peppering Art with questions and challenging his assertions.
Later in the day, the Kemp economic team would often meet in Art's hotel in D.C. to discuss policy ideas and how best to explain the tax plan to other Republicans, business people, those in the media and the public at large.
Jack had the remarkable ability to take economic truths and make them understandable to everyone - "You cannot hate the employer and love the employee." No one was better than Jack in explaining how all benefit from a bigger economic pie. In his own words, he was "a bleeding-heart conservative," and he understood that without rapid job creation the poor and many minorities would not have a chance for better lives.
