Richard Nixon photo

Excerpts of Remarks of the Vice President of the United States, Rally at Lancaster, PA

November 01, 1960

Of all Mr. Kennedy's never-never economic ideas, none is more fuzzy than his claim that everything he proposes can be paid for by new revenues derived from expanding the economy and increasing efficiency in Government, and not by new and heavier taxes or by deficit spending and inflation.

Fiscal experts say his platform would cost $15 billion or more a year over and above what we are now spending on the Federal budget. Mr. Kennedy has never offered any solid figures of his own to refute this expert cost analysis. He hasn't simply because he can't and he knows he can't.

By now he has made so many promises to so many people that they are colliding with each other.

To get the more than $15 billion extra in Federal taxes from an expanding economy at going tax rates, he would need a magic wand - in fact he would need two or three for he would have to conjure up a jump of some $85 billion in the country's gross national products jump of about 17 percent. He couldn't do that in 1 year, or 2 or 3. Nobody could.

The plain truth is that there are only two ways to pay for this huge spending program of his - new taxes or new and ever larger deficits. I challenge him to say which it will be.

He says he is for a balanced budget.

What new taxes does he intend to levy?

If he does not intend to levy new taxes, which of his platform promises is he now going to repudiate?

Or is he going to keep all his promises and abandon his support of a balanced budget? One thing is certain: Senator Kennedy has set a new all-time record for promises - promises all logic shows he could not keep.

Is he going to run the huge deficits that such a course would require?

If he runs the deficits - the course of least resistance - then the American people would be in for another ruinous round of inflation.

That would mean-

Shrinking dollars in the pay envelope.

Clipping the value of pensions, savings, social security.

Boom following by a bust with its unemployment and business failures.

Does Mr. Kennedy, who has insisted on trying to debase the image of America throughout the world, also insist on trying to debase our currency.?

The American people want none of this. They are interested in economic growth in our country - real growth, growth without inflation, growth without boom and bust.

Richard Nixon, Excerpts of Remarks of the Vice President of the United States, Rally at Lancaster, PA Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/273630