Jack Kemp, the quarterback who sold the party on growth

A quarterback has about three seconds. The ball is snapped, the defense is a blur, and he has to read what is in front of him, decide, and throw before the pocket collapses. Nobody teaches that in a graduate seminar. You learn it by getting hit. Jack Kemp learned it over more than a decade in professional football, and then he took the habit into Congress, where he spent eighteen years throwing a very unfashionable pass: the idea that the way to help the poor is to grow the economy, and the way to grow the economy is to keep more of what people earn.

I want to tell you about him for two reasons. One is that he was good company, and the party has too few men like him. The other is that nearly everything we argue about today in tax policy, from the top rate to enterprise zones, has a Kemp fingerprint on it. He lost some of his arguments and won others, and the ones he lost teach as much as the ones he won. This is a profile of a public career: what he did, what he stood for, and what a conservative reader can learn from it.

From the huddle to the House

Jack Kemp was born in Los Angeles in 1935 and played college football at Occidental College. He played professional football in the American Football League, and his best years were with the Buffalo Bills. He was the quarterback on the Bills teams that won the AFL championships in 1964 and 1965, and he was named the league's most valuable player in 1965.

A quarterback learns a few things the rest of us do not. He learns that a team is made of different men with different gifts, and that you win by getting each of them the ball. He learns to play with Black and white teammates in a locker room where the only color that mattered was the jersey. That mattered to Kemp for the rest of his life. He served as president of the AFL Players Association, and in 1965, when Black players raised objections to the way they were treated in New Orleans ahead of the league's all-star game, the game was moved to Houston. Kemp was a leader among the players in that period. It's a piece of public record that he often pointed to when he told the Republican Party that it had to talk to everyone.

In 1970 he ran for Congress from the Buffalo area, as a Republican, and won. He served nine terms, from 1971 to 1989, which is eighteen years. A pro athlete in the House of Representatives was a curiosity at first. What the House got was an autodidact who read economists the way other men read playbooks.

The idea he fell in love with

In the mid-1970s Kemp met the supply-side economists. Arthur Laffer, the economic journalist Jude Wanniski and others were making an argument that unsettled the post-war consensus. The consensus held that the economy was a matter of managing demand: spend more or tax less to push demand up, spend less or tax more to cool it. The supply-siders said the missing piece was incentives: what you get to keep from an extra hour, an extra dollar of savings, or an extra worker hired. If rates were so high that they discouraged the activity being taxed, then cutting them could expand the whole pie. I explain the logic and its limits in The Laffer curve explained, and the claim it never actually made, and I urge you to read that before you quote it.

Kemp understood the political value of it right away. In the 1970s Americans were being squeezed by inflation and by bracket creep, which I describe in reagan's 1981 tax cut and the quiet end of bracket creep, and the usual answer from the right was austerity: tighten the belt. Kemp offered a different message. We can be the party of growth. Cut the rates, and everyone's prospects rise. That is a much better pitch, and a much better temperament, than the gloom of the budget-balancer. It is the upbeat note in conservatism: we are going to win, and here is why.

Kemp-Roth

The vehicle was a bill. In the late 1970s Kemp joined Senator William Roth of Delaware, a Republican who had been thinking along similar lines, and they introduced the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which called for a 30 percent across-the-board cut in individual income tax rates, phased in over three years.

Here is why that was radical. Republicans of the time were often the party of the balanced budget, and a big tax cut without a matching spending cut would have been heresy for a Taft Republican. Kemp's answer was that the tax rate was the thing most holding back the economy, and that you could argue about the budget separately. The bill did not pass in those years. But Ronald Reagan adopted the idea during the 1980 campaign, and the Republican platform that year embraced it. The 1981 tax law that finally passed was an across-the-board cut in the same spirit, though smaller than Kemp-Roth's 30 percent. Remember our arithmetic: the cuts of 5, 10 and 10 percent compounded to about 23 percent.

So the first thing to learn from Kemp is the power of a clear number. "Thirty percent over three years" fits on a bumper sticker and in a speech. Reformers who cannot say what they want in a sentence rarely win.

Enterprise zones

If tax rates were Kemp's first love, his second was a notion that he took to the toughest neighborhoods in America. Around 1980 he and Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat who represented a district in the South Bronx, introduced a bill to create enterprise zones: designated distressed areas where taxes and regulations would be lightened, so that businesses would start up, hire, and stay.

Think about who was in that room. A Republican from Buffalo and a Democrat from the Bronx, working on a plan to bring jobs to a neighborhood where many buildings stood empty. It was a rare instance of two parties proposing the same fix to the same problem, and it came out of Kemp's conviction that a conservative has to have something to say to the person who has been left out. His view was that the opportunity society was not a slogan; it was a promise that the government's job was to clear the path, not to fill the plate.

The federal enterprise zone idea was not enacted in Kemp's form in the 1980s. A version, under the name of empowerment zones, was passed in 1993 under a Democratic President. Many states created their own enterprise zones in the intervening years. Whether they worked is a matter of study, and the results are mixed. A fair assessment is that tax breaks alone do not bring a neighborhood back; safe streets, good schools and access to credit matter at least as much. But Kemp's central insight, that a poor neighborhood needs more investment rather than more administration, is one that conservatives are right to keep repeating. See Jack Kemp argued that growth could win the war on poverty for more on that argument.

The 1986 reform and the housing years

Kemp was also a force in the tax reform that I describe in the 1986 tax reform that lowered rates by closing loopholes. In the mid-1980s he teamed with Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin on a simplified, low-rate plan that helped define the field, alongside the Democratic plan from Bradley and Gephardt. The final law was not his bill, but it carried his principle: lower rates on a broader base.

He left the House at the end of 1988 after running for the Republican presidential nomination, which was won by George H. W. Bush. Bush then named him Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Kemp served from 1989 to 1993. It was a job that many politicians considered a dead end. He treated it as a laboratory. His signature effort was to push for tenant ownership of public housing: selling units to the families who lived in them, on the theory that a person who owns an apartment treats it differently from a person who rents from a bureaucracy. The program carried the name HOPE, for Home Ownership for People Everywhere. It never reached the scale he wanted, and critics argued that it was underfunded and poorly targeted. Supporters answered that he was fighting a department culture that was more comfortable managing poverty than ending it.

I won't tell you he succeeded. What I will say is that his reasoning is the right kind of reasoning for a conservative: ownership changes behavior, responsibility breeds dignity, and a dollar spent to give a family a stake does more than a dollar spent to give it a check.

1996, and Empower America

After leaving HUD in 1993, Kemp co-founded a policy organization called Empower America with several allies, which continued to press the ideas of growth, opportunity and reform. In 1996 Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, chose Kemp as his running mate. It was a choice that said something about both men. Dole was a veteran of the Senate, a deal-maker, and a fiscal hawk by reputation, and he reached for Kemp because the campaign needed a message about growth, and Dole had made a 15 percent income tax cut the center of his platform. The ticket lost to the incumbent, Bill Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore. Kemp and Gore had one televised vice presidential debate, on October 9, 1996, in St. Petersburg, Florida. If you want to understand Dole, Bob Dole came home wounded from Italy and became a master of the Senate is the post for you.

Kemp died on May 2, 2009. Whatever you think of his politics, the obituaries from both sides noted the same trait: he was relentlessly, almost irritatingly, optimistic.

The argument he lost

Now to the part that is rarely told in the speeches. Kemp had a long-running argument with the deficit hawks inside his own party, and in the 1980s and 1990s the hawks won more rounds than he did.

Here is the argument at its strongest, from both sides.

1. Kemp's side. Taxes were the problem, and cutting them was the first priority. A larger economy produces more revenue, more jobs and more opportunity. The right way to deal with the deficit is to grow out of it and restrain spending later. A party that leads with austerity will lose elections and miss the chance to lift people up.
2. The hawks' side. The arithmetic did not work in the short run. After the 1981 cut, deficits grew. Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, said in a 1986 book that the numbers had not added up. Hawks such as Bob Dole, who chaired the Senate Finance Committee, argued that a tax cut without a spending plan would leave the country with a bill and the party with a credibility problem.
3. What happened. Both sides were partly right. Rates came down and the economy grew, but deficits ran high through much of the 1980s, the party went through the budget fights of 1982, 1990 and the years after, and the argument between growth and restraint never ended. In 1990 President Bush, who had told voters "read my lips," signed a budget deal with a tax increase, and the story of what that cost him is told in Read My Lips and How the 1990 Budget Deal Led to the 1992 Defeat. Kemp was in the Bush cabinet then, and the fight inside the party was real.

What do I take from it? That the movement needs both temperaments. Kemp's optimism makes the party electable and his focus on incentives is correct. The hawks' arithmetic keeps the party honest. The Republicans who did best, Reagan on his best days, understood that you need the pro-growth sunshine and the spending discipline together. A party that forgets either half is a party that loses.

What to learn from his career

• Say it in one sentence. Kemp-Roth was a number and a timeline. Know what you want, and say it plainly.
• Be the party of the next worker, not just the last one. He insisted that Republicans take their message into neighborhoods that never voted for them. That is both principle and practice: you cannot win an argument you refuse to make.
• Pair the sunshine with the arithmetic. A cut that is not matched by restraint hands the other side a deficit to use against you.
• Use the other party's allies. His best bills carried Democratic co-sponsors. That's not weakness; it is how things become law.
• Stay cheerful. Nobody wants to follow a man who sounds like he is reading a eulogy.

The bottom line

• Jack Kemp played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills in their AFL championship years of 1964 and 1965, served in the House from 1971 to 1989, and later ran HUD under President George H. W. Bush.
• His Kemp-Roth bill, a 30 percent cut over three years, set the template for the 1981 law, and his work on enterprise zones took the pro-growth message into poor neighborhoods.
• He lost an argument with the deficit hawks that his party is still having. Learn both sides of it before you take one.
• Next time someone says Republicans have nothing to offer working-class and inner-city families, tell them about enterprise zones and tenant ownership, and then ask what they have tried.
• Check the record of tax and growth bills for yourself on Congress.gov or on our bills page, and compare what a member says with how he votes on our votes page.