"No Jack Kennedy"

"The 1964 tax cut has been embraced by supply-siders as a supply-side cut, and JFK even sold it that way to big business in a 1962 speech that supply-siders love to quote. But in fact Kennedy, and his chief economist Walter Heller, saw the tax cut as a demand-side cut aimed at creating old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus in a sluggish economy. Indeed, what Kennedy really wanted was to stimulate the economy through government spending, but he didn’t have the votes in Congress for that. So he went with the tax cut instead. The giveaway that Kennedy's wasn’t really a supply-side tax cut was that the cuts were greater in the middle and at the bottom than at the top. If you want to stimulate consumer purchasing, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts in the middle and at the bottom. If you want to stimulate investment, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the top—or, if that’s politically impossible, you make the cuts the same across the board. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981 was pretty obviously a supply-side cut because it lowered the top tax rate more than it did rates at the middle or the bottom. After it passed, White House budget chief David Stockman got in a lot of trouble for admitting what was obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention: The only cuts Reagan cared about were those at the top. 'It's kind of hard to sell "trickle down,"' Stockman blurted out to William Greider in the Atlantic, 'so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really "trickle down." Supply-side is "trickle-down" theory.'"

Timothy Noah at The New Republic explains why Kennedy-Johnson tax policy was not what Romney-Ryan is now proposing.