One does not want to be disrespectful of the dead, and Jack Kemp was an admirable man in many ways. If the Republican Party had only followed his advice about reaching out to the inner cities and underclass—and ignored his happy talk about supply-side economics—the GOP might not be in nearly the fix it is today. Unfortunately the opposite happened. Kemp, a consummate professional as a football player, was a classic case of an amateur econo-cultist whose understanding never reached quite deep enough. In mid-life, when he decided to switch from sports to politics, Kemp became enamored of simplistic free-market ideas, in particular a toxic combination of Arthur Laffer and Ayn Rand. He then sold another gifted amateur, Ronald Reagan, on the idea that drastic tax cuts would so stimulate the economy that the ensuing growth would more than make up for the loss in revenues. In pushing this idea, Kemp proved to be as effective a quarterback in Washington politics as he had been one on the gridiron, and the results are now economic history—much of it bad, though the tax cuts did help give the Reagan economy a jolt. Kemp was such an economic purist—i.e., amateur—that he argued with Reagan himself a number of times when the president decided that perhaps he’d cut taxes enough.
But the damage was done, and thanks in part to Jack Kemp the supply-side fantasy endured, producing the vast Reagan deficits. Those deficits later inspired Bill Clinton to focus his entire economic program on lowering interest rates early in his first term. Clinton’s success at that, in turn, and his somewhat mistaken belief that the ‘90s boom was the direct result of placating the bond market (though it had at least as much to do with the tech bubble and productivity gains) led directly to the Age of Rubin, which is to say the massive deregulation of Wall Street. Kemp’s influence also contributed mightily to the Bush administration’s total fecklessness about deficits (in Dick Cheney’s infamous formulation, “Reagan showed that deficits don’t matter”). All of which brings us up to the present economic disaster, which now includes what is the largest projected budget deficit since World War II. It’s not fair to blame Jack Kemp, who died over the weekend, for all this—and I don’t—but it is fair to say that this is the Kemp legacy that will likely remain with us the longest. It’s the missing piece you didn’t see in the obits.
