Kennedy: The Classic Biography by Ted Sorensen

Author:Ted Sorensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Lawyers & Judges, Kennedy, Presidents, 20th century, Presidents & Heads of State, United States - Politics and government - 1961-1963, Presidents - United States, General, United States, Legal Profession, John F, Biography & Autobiography, Law, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780061967849
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-20T04:12:28.940930+00:00

PERSISTING PROBLEMS

In the end the President sided with us. He realized that he faced a deep-rooted sluggishness in the economy which posed a more serious and longer-range problem than mere recovery from recession. In a sense, his problem was the companion of Roosevelt’s a generation earlier. The thirties were confronted with an extraordinarily low supply of jobs for those looking for work. The sixties were confronted by an extraordinarily high number of potential workers far exceeding the supply of jobs. Unless the economy grew fast enough to create new jobs as rapidly as the manpower tide increased, there would be no end to recurring recessions, or even to high unemployment in the midst of prosperity. From 1947 to 1962 the civilian labor force grew by nearly twelve million men and women, but the number of jobs grew by only ten million. As a result, said the President, our loss of man-hours even in a year of prosperity, as measured by those willing but unable to find full-time work, “was a staggering one billion workdays, equivalent to shutting down the entire country with no production, no services and no pay for over three weeks.”

As unemployment declined for skilled breadwinners who were white, it remained high for the unskilled, the Negro and the young. As jobs increased in new industries and service establishments, they decreased in old industries—coal, textiles, railroads and others. The economists called much of it “structural unemployment,” the pessimists said it was unavoidable, and after each recession it grew worse.

John Kennedy’s wealth had never made him immune to the suffering of others, and poverty in the midst of plenty disturbed him. His experiences in New England and West Virginia had made him more attuned to specific solutions for specific problems—depressed areas, untrained workers, substandard wages. But he recognized that both the general economy and the specific problems had to be treated. “Large-scale unemployment during a recession is bad enough,” he told the Congress. “Large-scale unemployment during a period of prosperity would be intolerable.”

Long-range growth required long-range efforts—particularly the education of our youth, the conservation of our resources, the expansion of our science and health—and it was no coincidence that the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses set unequaled marks in those same areas. In addition, as a spur to industrial modernization and expansion, the Kennedy administration proposed in 1961 the payment of a 7 percent tax credit for business investment in new machinery and equipment. Passed in 1962, it was accompanied by an administrative liberalization of the timetables and guidelines applied by Internal Revenue to the depreciation of machinery and equipment, speeding up by nearly a third the rate at which firms could write off those assets for tax purposes and purchase more productive replacements. This depreciation reform—long the No. 1 item on business’ list of requests, but abandoned by the previous administration as too difficult—provided, when combined with the investment tax credit, a 1962 reduction in business taxes of some $2.5 billion, an 11 percent tax cut for corporations.

Yet the tax credit bill was constantly in difficulty.

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