Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=326329690694754
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, May 04, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Jack Kemp: The godfather of supply-side economics helped spawn a revolution that unleashed America's entrepreneurs. He knew a lot about level playing fields, but that equal opportunity did not mean equal success.
Read More: General Politics
In the middle of the Carter years, a congressman from the unlikely precincts of Buffalo, N.Y., had an idea: "When you tax something you get less of it, and when you reward something you get more of it."
With that simple thought, Jack Kemp would change his party, his country and, ultimately, the world.
In legislative form, it became a bill called Kemp-Roth that he sponsored in the House of Representatives. William Roth, a Delaware Republican, would sponsor it in the Senate. It met resistance and failed at first. But as in his football career, Kemp kept going deep.
Kemp, a star in the AFL and GOP.
The concept was daring: cut federal income tax rates over three years. He would reward the risk takers, savers and investors by letting them keep more of what they earned. He would not spread the wealth around. He would let people create and keep their own.
By 1980, he had convinced candidate Ronald Reagan that it would be the mechanism of economic recovery, and the idea was written into the Republican platform. In August 1981, President Reagan was signing it into law. The rest, as they say, is history.
Double-digit inflation and interest rates vanished as Reagan not only reversed the malaise of Jimmy Carter but fueled an economic boom that lasted 92 months and created 20 million new jobs. The economy grew by a third and tax receipts doubled as we added the equivalent of the West German economy to our own.
Jack Kemp was a self-proclaimed "bleeding-heart conservative" who believed that compassion was measured not by how much money was bestowed on the poor but by how much opportunity was given to them. He was an advocate of inner-city "enterprise zones" that would attract job-creating businesses and entrepreneurs, not community organizers.
His preference was not a welfare check but the opportunity for a paycheck. He was a football player in an integrated sport where there was no need for affirmative action, at least not on the playing field. If you could block, tackle, catch, throw or run better than the next guy, you had a chance to succeed on your own merits and as far as your legs or arm could take you.
As quarterback, he led the Buffalo Bills to American Football League championships in 1964 and 1965. He co-founded the AFL players association in 1964 and was elected union president for five terms.
He would translate this success into nine terms as the representative from Buffalo.
Unfortunately, his 1988 presidential bid would fail. But he would serve four years as secretary of housing and urban development, a post in which he observed, and fought, the disastrous effects of modern urban liberalism.
From January 1993 to July 2004, he was co-director of the appropriately named Empower America, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy and advocacy organization he co-founded with William Bennett and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. That was what Kemp was about: empowering Americans and not government.
Kemp was also a good friend of Investor's Business Daily, writing columns, speaking at our economic conferences and talking us up whenever he could. It made us proud, and we'll always be grateful.
We have wandered far afield from Kemp's dream of an entrepreneurial society where government got out of the way and hard work and success were rewarded rather than punished or redistributed to others.
As the nation struggles with multitrillion-dollar deficits and stealth socialism, we may soon feel the need to reopen Jack Kemp's free-market playbook and go deep. He is already missed.
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