The Hoover-Carter campaign brings together a partnership of a progressive Republican and a conservative Democrat who are willing to work across party lines to solve our economic problems and put Americans back to work. If elected, we will implement the same time-tested strategies that have served us so well in the past:
- Higher Taxes: prior to the start of the Great Depression, Hoover's first Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, had proposed and seen enacted, numerous tax cuts, which cut the top income tax rate from 73% to 24% (under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge). When combined with the sharp decline in incomes during the early depression, the result was a serious deficit in the federal budget. Congress, desperate to increase federal revenue, enacted the Revenue Act of 1932, which was the largest peacetime tax increase in history. The Act increased taxes across the board, so that top earners were taxed at 63% on their net income. The 1932 Act also increased the tax on the net income of corporations from 12% to 13.75%.
- Protecting American Jobs: After the 1929 stock market crash, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months following that event, peaking at 9 percent, then drifted downwards until it reached 6.3 percent in June 1930. Then the federal government made its first major intervention in the economy with the Smoot-Hawley tariff. After that intervention the downward movement of unemployment rates reversed and shot up far beyond the level it had reached in the wake of the stock market crash hitting 11.6 percent in November 1930.
- Green Energy Investment: Carter wore a sweater on April 17, 1977 while delivering a televised "fireside chat" and declaring during the speech (clenching his fist for dramatic effect) that the U.S. energy situation during the 1970s was the moral equivalent of war. Carter encouraged energy conservation by all U.S. citizens and installed solar panels on the White House, and wore sweaters while turning down the heat within the White House.
- Auto Bailouts: the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, is extremely important not only for Chrysler and its employees, its dealers, its suppliers, not only important for Detroit but for all the people of our country and, I think, almost every State in our Nation, in fact, almost every community.
- Financial Reform: As Jimmy Carter stepped before the television cameras in the East Room of the White House [in March of 1980], his task was not just to proclaim another new anti-inflation program but to calm a national alarm that had begun to border on panic. Inflation and interest rates, both topping 18%, are so far beyond anything that Americans have experienced in peacetime—and so far beyond anything that U.S. financial markets are set up to handle—as to inspire a contagion of fear.
