The Nation - News from June 17, 1985

White House Communications Director Patrick J. Buchanan, in a letter to the New York Times, said Gov. Mario M. Cuomo exceeded his “normal level” of “nastiness” and “falsifications” in remarks June 7 in response to a Buchanan defense of President Reagan’s tax reform plan. Buchanan reportedly had said earlier that high-tax states such as New York had taken a “neo-socialist” approach to redistributing wealth and that a goal of the tax plan is to tilt the system in favor of “traditional families in which the husband works outside the home and the wife takes care of the children.” Cuomo had called those remarks “ugly rhetoric” unworthy of the White House.