The Contract with America targeted progressive taxation and government size

Evidence

Once in power, the House Republicans sought to push through the contract they had made with suburban voters. Dick Armey and Bill Archer, for instance, hoped to make radical reductions in federal taxation. They differed in their approaches—Armey preferred installing an extremely low flat tax, while Archer favored a consumption-based solution like a national sales tax—but their goal was the same: the end of the progressive income tax. Such a change would, of course, drastically reduce federal revenues and thereby help the GOP meet another of its goals, shrinking the size of government. Without doubt, the antigovernment animus of the suburban Sunbelt reached unprecedented heights with the new Republican leadership. “There is hardly a federal agency so obscure, a policy so benign, that it has not aroused its own aspiring executioner in the GOP,” noted journalists Dan Balz and Ron Brownstein. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 586

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: National anti-welfare conservatism channeled prior racial resentment — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 587