Hi Politics, It's Nice To See You Again

I'm not sure why it's been this way recently, but I just haven't been as into the political scene as I normally would be. I think this summer I got away from a lot of things that I normally do, and being back up here it's easy for me to get back into old school (not like old skool) patterns which includes more motivated thoughts coupled with a good amount of time wasting, which usually includes a lot of keeping up with politics.

I have a few favorite political writers. Jay Nordlinger is my favorite by far. I used to read David Brooks a lot more, who is a New York Times Op-Ed guy. Thomas Sowell, Byron York, and Michael Barone are all pretty great. Someone that I've been getting into more recently has been Jeff Jacoby. He writes for the Boston Globe, and his stuff is a great conservative take on political issues. Jay is pure conservative. David is more moderate-conservative. Jeff seems to be pretty strictly conservative. I haven't read a ton of his stuff, but his opinions line up well with my own, from what I've read so far. You can visit his website here, and his most recent article is in reference to the passing of Ted Kennedy, and how being a Kennedy used to mean a supply-side tax cutter. Here is an excerpt from the article:

HIS NAME WAS KENNEDY. He was the preeminent figure in the Democratic Party. And he was a resolute supply-side tax-cutter.

"It is a paradoxical truth," he once told the Economic Club of New York, "that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." What he had in mind, he said, was not "a 'quickie' or a temporary tax cut." He wanted nothing less than "an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes."

Would he be a Democrat today?
Those were not the words of Senator Edward Kennedy. The speaker – in December 1962 -- was President John F. Kennedy, and his ringing call for tax cuts was no anomaly.

In a televised address from the Oval Office four months earlier, JFK had called high tax rates a danger to "the very essence of the progress of a free society: the incentive of additional return for additional effort." In his 1963 State of the Union message, he said his first priority was "the enactment this year of a substantial reduction and revision in federal income taxes." In the speech he was scheduled to deliver to the Texas Democratic State Committee on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy planned to report proudly: "We have proposed a massive tax reduction, with particular benefits for small business."

In recent days, Ted Kennedy has been justly acclaimed as a lion of the Democratic Party. But how different the party mourning Kennedy today is from the one that first nominated him in 1962!

And maybe you're wondering what it means to be a supply-side tax cutter. Go here.

I'm not entirely sure that this will mean that I'll be commenting more frequently on politics again. I have ebbs and flows, and I kind of feel like I'm coming out of my ebb once again. We'll see. One thing that will certainly keep me interested will be a voting behavior class that I'll be auditing in the political science department. Hopefully I can jump onto some of the research that that guy is doing.

Ahhhhh, there is so much ambition in the air. Must be the start of another fall semester.