Amity did a commentary item for Marketplace radio yesterday, suggesting Coolidge as a model for current policymakers. I’ve included an excerpt below.

Coincidentally, I did an interview for Marketplace on Friday, exploring the history of tax rates. My comments on Coolidge ended up on the  cutting room floor (to use an anachronistic metaphor), but I suspect Silent Cal readers might be interested in the subject anyway.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt from Amity’s commentary. Link to the audi and ful text is at the end:

As presidents go, Calvin Coolidge is an unlikely hero. Conservatives focus on him far less than they do on Ronald Reagan, and after all, Coolidge served a long time ago, from 1923 to 1929. Coolidge said “no” so often that he was trashed as lazy even by his own peers. Today, Coolidge is held in such low esteem by most Americans that if they remember anything, it is his nickname: Silent Cal.

But Coolidge did three things that stand out today, especially from our budgetary perspective. The first was to monitor federal spending — personally, with his own pencil, and intensely. As president, Coolidge met with his budget director every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Once cuts had been made, Coolidge made more. Coolidge monitored every penny spent down to the salt and pepper on the dinner table. The housekeeper at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Miss Riley, managed to cut her outlays from $11,667.10 one year, down to $9,116.39 the next. “Very fine improvement,” the president wrote in a note to her.

More at: Looking to President Coolidge for budgetary perspective

I wrote a short piece for the Wall Street Journal today that might interest Coolidge fans. While it doesn’t mention Coolidge specifically, it focuses on one of his favorite issues: taxation.

Take a look — I suspect some of you will have thoughts.

Soaking the Rich: An American Tradition – WSJ.com.

Two weeks before election day in 1924, Washington Star cartoonist Clifford Berryman took aim at the partisan competition over tax cuts.

In an era of buoyant revenues and restrained spending, lawmakers felt free to promise additional tax relief. Partisan divisions centered not on the desirability of tax cuts in general, but on their distribution in particular.

For the most part, Democrats were eager to raise income tax exemptions, thereby freeing more Americans from a tax widely considered a rich man’s burden. Republicans, by contrast, were more interested in cutting marginal rates for the income tax, while also arguing for elimination of the federal estate tax.

Find more on 1920s tax policy at the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts.