Trent Lott Quotes
The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there - from tax policy, to foreign policy; from individual rights, to neighborhood security - are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.
Lott, Trent. Interview by Richard Quinn. Southern Partisan, vol. 4, no. 4, Fall 1984, p. 47.
This quotation was very important because the most important economic principle of Republican ideology since the 1960s has been that tax cuts will produce economic growth and the converse: that tax increases will stifle economic growth. For 50 years the Republican nostrum for all economic problems has been to increase growth by cutting taxes and opposing all tax increases. However Leonhardt studied the data and results since 1987 and found that the Republican doctrine had been wrong. Economic growth plummeted when we had the largest tax cuts in the George W. Bush years and the greatest growth spurts were following the 1990 George W. Bush tax increase and the 1993 Bill Clinton tax cuts. When the data became public some Republicans took the view that taxes were just one of the factors determining economic growth and have been overwhelmed by other factors. Some Democrats argue that if this were really believed by Republicans, they would have favored these other factors more so than tax cuts when in fact tax cuts are always their nostrum.
That was not always true. Many of the greatest Republican Presidents and other political leaders argued for and passed many new taxes when they thought they were needed. The radical shift to the extreme right of the Republicans started in the latter part of the 20th century and continued into the 21st.
Corporate and business taxes were anathema to Republicans in 1899 as they were a century later. Roosevelt shocked the Republican base with statements like this, and when he implemented them, he became the most popular politician in America—possibly even more so than George Washington.
Chester Trent Lott Sr. is an American author and former politician. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. Later in his career, he became Senate Majority Leader, and, alternately, Senate Minority Leader. In 2003, he stepped down from the position after controversy due to his praising of senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid.
