We’re Going To Tax Their A** Off!

by Corey Robin

Growing up in the 1970s, I had an almost primal association to the GOP as the party of the thrifty and the flinty. Republicans were the grownups at the table, forever cautioning the children against taking that extra piece of cake. Averse to spending money the country didn’t have, they were as leery of deficits as they were of rhetoric. Plainspoken, economizing men of austerity: that was the GOP.

There was some truth to this picture, extending back several decades. Herbert Hoover helped send the Republican Party into twenty years of exile via his ill-timed effort to balance the budget with a hefty tax increase in 1932. One of the first things Eisenhower did upon coming into office was to insist on balancing the budget. Thanks to the Korean War, tax rates were high, and many Republicans wanted Eisenhower to reduce them. He refused, saying “we cannot afford to reduce taxes, reduce income, until we have in sight a program of expenditures that shows that the factors of income and of outgo will be balanced. Now that is just to my mind sheer necessity.” Upon taking office, both Nixon and Ford pursued similar paths, and resisted similar tax-cutting calls from their party.