Jack Kemp the quaterback for tax cuts dies

NY Times:

Jack Kemp, the former football star turned congressman who with an evangelist’s fervor moved the Republican Party to a commitment to tax cuts as the central focus of economic policy, died Saturday evening at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 73.

...

... his greatest legacy may stem from his years as a Buffalo congressman, especially 1978, when his argument for sharp tax cuts to promote economic growth became party policy, one that has endured to this day.

The nation, Mr. Kemp told the House that year, having embraced a supply-side economic theory, suffered under a “tax code that rewards consumption, leisure, debt and borrowing, and punishes savings, investment, work and production.”

Ronald Reagan adopted the issue as a central one in his 1980 presidential campaign, and in 1981 he won passage of a 23 percent cut over three years. The legislation was known as Kemp-Roth, named for Mr. Kemp and William V. Roth Jr., the Delaware Republican and his Senate co-sponsor.

...

Mr. Kemp won his House seat in 1970 because of his celebrity as an all-star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, twice champions of the American Football League. He often connected his concern for minorities with his respect for his black teammates, especially the linemen who had protected him from pass rushers.

...

Mr. Kemp was an unlikely leader for a political cause based on a theory of economics. He had majored in physical education while playing football at Occidental College in Los Angeles. When he entered politics, many Washington veterans dismissed him as a “dumb jock,” and as a junior House member in 1977, he did not even serve on the tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means.

But though Mr. Kemp had not studied a lot at Occidental, he had been making up for it for years. On long team flights in the A.F.L., his reading habits — Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley Jr., among others — stood out. The wide receiver Elbert Dubenion recalled in 2009, “He was reading these political books, and we were reading the Katzenjammer Kids.”

Mr. Kemp first heard about supply-side theory, as advanced by Arthur B. Laffer, a University of Southern California economist, in 1976. Soon he immersed himself in the case for tax cuts, reading deeply from the works of the Laffer camp as well as its critics. When he debated the subject on the House floor, he cited studies on the money supply, the experience of Britain and Sweden, and the impact of past tax cuts in the United States.

He persuaded his House colleagues to bring the idea to a vote in 1977 and three times more, in 1978. Each time they sought to reduce taxes across the board, starting with the 70 percent marginal rate, which was then imposed on the highest incomes. They lost each time — once by only five votes — but they had an election issue.

Mr. Kemp had also convinced Bill Brock, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that the issue was political gold. “He said, in effect, we need to restore the essence of our party, which is growth, which is jobs, which is creativity,” Mr. Brock said in an interview earlier this year. “And the way to do that is to free people of the burden of excessive taxes.”

Mr. Brock said the issue was central to the Republicans’ gaining 15 seats in the House of Representatives and 3 in the Senate in the fall of 1978.

...

Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said of Mr. Kemp: “I think there is no doubt that he had a greater impact on conservative and Republican economic philosophy than anybody else. More than Laffer, more than Reagan.” And the change he helped bring about was not just in the party’s attitude toward taxes, Mr. Ornstein said; Republicans, he said, were “no longer worshiping at the shrine of a balanced budget, for better and for worse.”

...

We sometimes forget his contribution to the modern Republican Party and the Reagan Revolution. We need people with his kind of leadership and drive.

I thought he was a pretty good football player too, although he probably would have never gotten the opportunity to excel as a pro without the AFL. He also led a boycott of the AFL all star game in New Orleans in 1965 because the black players could not be served with their team mates. As a result the gave was moved to Houston.