It was in the mid-1970s that I embraced what I considered to be common sense policies of cutting income taxes as a powerful way to encourage work, thrift, and investment, while discouraging indolence and sheltered, idle capital. The individual who most influenced me was then-U.S. Congressman Jack F. Kemp (Rep., New York), a self-educated former MVP American Football League quarterback, whose speeches offered lessons from history, delivered in a high energy speaking style he may have honed while calling plays in Buffalo Bills huddles.
Kemp’s legislation proposed to reduce Federal income tax rates by one third, and he soon gained Delaware U.S. Senator Bill Roth as a co-sponsor, and a key endorsement from then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Some months after Reagan’s 1981 inauguration, the “Reagan-Kemp-Roth” legislation passed the Democrat House and the Republican Senate, and was signed into law at the president’s California ranch in 1981.
