Coolest Cal

A Valentine to this Nation would be a budget cutting, responsible and parsimonious President, much like Coolidge, rather than the budget busting, irresponsible and profligate President we've been stuck with. m/r

Coolest Cal - Interview - National Review Online
Feb. 13, 2013 - Amity Shlaes, interviewed
Understanding Coolidge and what works.

Even when small, the boy saw politics firsthand,” Amity Shlaes writes of Calvin Coolidge. “At town meetings, it was his father who worked or spoke; Calvin sold apples and popcorn at the meetings, as his father had before him. The villagers noticed early that Calvin was always quiet; when someone played the violin, he would not dance, but was always observant.” Good thing he discovered early on that “politics somehow afforded distraction from loneliness,” because that diligence would serve the 30th president of the United States well. Shlaes, author of the new book Coolidge, talks toNational Review Online about Coolidge and what we might learn from him.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s so cool about Coolidge?

AMITY SHLAES: Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.

Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents — Nixon, Ike, and Reagan — you see them failing on this score.

What else is cool? Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn’t start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books. But that success was real, and it was fun to get close to it. A book to read after Coolidge? Taxation: The People’s Business, by Mellon.

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