Amity Shlaes, author of the fine The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, has an essay originally published at Forbes in which she praises Calvin Coolidge as The Great Refrainer.
Shlaes writes that
When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge knew he was going to need another pair of hands to launch further reforms. One of his first moves as President was to reject the Treasury Secretary’s resignation. [Andrew] Mellon became the navigator who charted Coolidge’s economic course. The pair worked well together because they were alike; both were so taciturn that it was said they conversed in pauses. Whenever they could, Coolidge and Mellon, professional minimalists, pared away unnecessary features of their craft to make it sleeker.
They began with the tax brackets. Both disliked the fact that under Wilson the tax schedule had gone from seven brackets to dozens, confusing taxpayers to the point they didn’t know what they should pay. Once the number of brackets was drastically reduced, more people could easily figure out what they owed.
But their grandest feat involved tax rates. Coolidge and Mellon tightened and pulled multiple times, eventually getting the top rate down to 25%, a level that hasn’t been seen since. Mellon argued that lower rates could actually bring in greater revenues because they removed disincentives to work. Government, he said, should operate like a railroad, charging a price for freight that “the traffic will bear.”
Coolidge’s commitment to low taxes came from his concept of property rights. He viewed heavy taxation as the legalization of expropriation. “I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more,” he once said. In fact, Coolidge disapproved of any government intervention that eroded the bond of the contract…..
Coolidge refrained from economic meddling, so that others might be unburdened.
He wasn’t much of a speaker, but his thinking was serious and sound. I have embedded below a clip of a short speech he gave. It is — and so very much seems — the speech of a man from another era, before audio-visual savvy.
If we are to spend — and we will — we should direct spending foremost to public safety, and assistance for the poor (including preserving current services that are of disproportionate benefit to those who are disadvantaged). Along these lines, there would be room for a much smaller government, and larger, more vibrant, private sphere of life.
I think that’s true nationally, and in small Whitewater, Wisconsin, too. (A discussion of the proposed 2011 Whitewater municipal budget is a topic for another time. Whitewater could have a budget with these emphases – safety and assistance – and still reduce spending.)
Hat tip for the link to Daniel Mitchell of Cato.