Grover Norquist on Reagan-Bush-Trump Tax Reforms and America’s Fiscal Future | Hoover Institution

What you can do is take the income tax and take away and have a, everybody can have a 401k or an IRA or an educate or a universal savings account. So here's, here's what I make. Here's the universal savings. Everything I save, you don't tax. What I spend is taxed, which is the income minus the investment. Okay. So you didn't create a new tapeworm. you sliced and made smaller the income that you do tax. It's a consumption tax because it's your income minus the stuff you saved.

This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution's Economic Policy Working Group, where we talk about economics, markets, and public policy. I'm John Hartley, your host. Today, my guest is Grover Norquist. who is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform. For more than four decades, Grover has been one of the most influential voices in the conservative movement on tax policy and limited government. Since founding Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, he's led efforts to oppose tax increases at the federal and state levels. He's helped to organize the Taxpayer Protection Pledge signed by hundreds of elected officials, and has played a critical role in nearly every major tax reform debate from the Reagan era through today. Grover, welcome to the podcast. John, good to be with you. Grover, I want to start at the beginning. You grew up in Massachusetts. How did you first become interested in economics and tax policy? Were there certain people or books or experiences that convinced you that taxes and fiscal policy were important, so much so to pursue it as your life's work?

I went to the Western Library Book Fair where they sell off all the old annoying books that they don't want anymore. Everything from the Cold War, every anti-communist book that existed, Whitaker Chambers, all of that stuff for a quarter and a nickel. And I read it and it became a Fairly well-read anti-communist, had a good grasp of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And Herb Philbrick, I led three lives. I got his autobiography. I lived on something called Liberal Hill in Western Massachusetts, also known as Red Hill to some people. Herb Philbrick had cell meetings nearby when he was a communist and inside the communist stock. So I... thought the Soviet Union was evil and a threat. And as I thought more about the dangers of state power, I realized that our government is not evil, but it had some problematic tendencies that any monopoly with power has and how dangerous that is. And so I was first an anti-statist, an anti-Soviet, and then I realized that there are real problems when a government puts too much power together against individuals on all senses. And from there, decided that the place where the state and individuals interact most historically is taxes. And how they raise taxes and the power that they raise taxes and what they do with the taxes. And just in my own mind decided that that was the zone I wanted to work in. And in this, I mean, talking in high school and I took a train into Boston to work on the Nixon campaign in 68, I was sixth, sixth, seventh grade, something like that. And so that was active politically. I never stopped being