JFK: The Conservative Democrat

What does a conservative Democrat look like? John F. Kennedy. Let's look at his policies.

- He pushed for a huge, across-the-board tax cut in the final year of his life: “By removing tax roadblocks to new jobs and new growth, the enactment of this measure next year will eventually more than make up in new revenue all that it will initially cost.”

- He believed in the 2nd amendment: "Today we need a nation of minutemen: citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of America, cannot succeed with any lesser effort."

- He was for a strong dollar, free enterprise and individual responsibility.

- He was fiercely anti-Communism and anti-socialism.

- He was anti-identity politics: "I do think that we ought to make an effort to give a fair chance to everyone who is qualified, not through a quota, but just look over our employment rolls, look over our areas where we are hiring people, and at least make sure we are giving everyone a fair chance, but not hard-and-fast quotas. We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color."

- He was for a strong military, strong civil defense, national defense and peace through strength.

- He was fiercely against the media spreading FAKE NEWS propaganda.

- He was pro-life: "Now, on the question of limiting population: As you know, the Japanese have been doing it very vigorously, through abortion, which I think would be repugnant to all Americans."

- His religious devotion was evidenced by his faith-based speeches.

- He ramped up military and defense spending.

- He harbored deep suspicions of the creeping influence of the intelligence community and Deep state. He was anti-Federal Reserve and anti-CIA.

- He was anti-welfare state. He believed welfare should be very modest and designed to meet absolutely essential needs, and with sufficient ‘deductible’ requirements to discourage any malingering.

- He twice rejected a union proposal to reduce the work week from 40 hours to 35.

- He believed in merit-based immigration, not chain migration.

- He kept deficits modest. His budget shortfalls for 1961-63 were, when summed, only slightly more than the 1959 deficit alone. “In fiscal matters, he was extremely conservative, very cautious about the size of the budget.”

- He maintained a strict, inflation-fighting price of $35 to the ounce of gold and, despite his gauzy rhetoric about a New Frontier, framed the Space Race as simply a new front in the Cold War: “Everything that we do really ought to be tied in to getting onto the moon and ahead of the Russians. Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”

- Kennedy disagreed with Senator Al Gore Sr. about the virtues of Keynesianism: Gore later said, “I thought the real needs of our society lay in the inadequacy of health, education, transportation. These were largely in the public sector. Not the private sector.” Kennedy disagreed: “To increase demand and lift our economy, the Federal Government’s most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private industry expenditures."

Kennedy NEVER identified himself as a liberal. On fiscal matters he was more conservative than any president we’ve had since, except President Trump.

On Nov. 22, 1963, the fateful motorcade through Dallas was headed for Fort Worth, where Kennedy planned to say these words: “by maintaining a more stable level of prices than almost any of our overseas competitors, and by cutting personal and corporate income taxes by some $11 billion, as I have proposed, we will assure this Nation of the longest and strongest expansion in our peacetime economic history.” Then they killed him.

President Trump couldn’t have said it better. Ask your liberal friends what happened to JFK's Democrat party. It was hijacked by the Communists.