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By Timothy P. Carney
© 2000, Human Events
Calling Al Gore’s spending plans “expansive, expensive and risky,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told reporters that the Democratic presidential candidate would add $2.6 to $3.4 trillion in new discretionary spending over the next decade, thus possibly exceeding the projected $3.3-trillion on-budget surplus.
“The vice president’s numerous spending proposals would devour, as we figure it, every dime of the federal budget surplus,” Domenici said.
Held two weeks ago, the press conference, which Domenici denied was intended to aid the election prospects of George W. Bush, accompanied the release of a 51-page Senate Budget Committee report on Gore’s proposals.
Amid their assaults on Gore’s “unprecedented burst of new spending,” Republican leaders admitted that they also intend to increase the size of the federal government and hike spending, but by lower amounts, if the party has control of the White House and both houses next year.
“We can’t expect real cuts, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Domenici told Human Events.
Domenici, Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., defended the current budget-cap-busting in Congress as well as George W. Bush’s proposed education spending hikes.
“We’re not going to fight over an anthill,” said Gramm, referring to the amount of this year’s overspending compared with Gore’s budget, “when we’ve got a mountain about to avalanche on our heads.”
The Senate report came one day after the Gore campaign issued its 191-page tome, “Prosperity for America’s Families,” that detailed Gore’s economic plans.
The Gore book disagreed with the GOP report on the cost of many of his programs, estimating that they would total $1.3 trillion.
The Republicans made their assessment of $2.6 to $3.4 trillion by adding the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates of the cost of President Clinton’s many spending requests to committee estimates of Gore’s additional proposals. When possible, the committee based its estimates on the CBO analysis of similar bills that have come before Congress.
Republicans criticized Gore for failing to address the long-term insolvency of Social Security.
“By using accounting gimmicks that have no effect on the program’s long-term funding gap, the vice president’s budget proposals simply shift higher tax burdens to future generations,” the report reads.
Gore would increase benefits for widows and widowers from two-thirds of the combined benefit for the couple prior to the death of a spouse to three-fourths of the couple’s benefit. He would also provide a parent credit. In order to pay for these increased benefits and to cover projected future shortfalls of Social Security, Gore would have future Congresses begin transferring money from the general fund to the Social Security trust fund in 2011. This shift — effectively transforming Social Security from a self-funded program based on the payroll tax to just another form of welfare — will not require either spending cuts or tax hikes because, Gore argues, the reduced national debt would alleviate the interest burden on future generations.
Government Accounting Office official David Walker is cited in the Budget Committee report as saying that Gore’s plan “does not come close to ‘saving Social Security'”
“The changes to the Social Security program,” he said, “will be more perceived than real.”
Republicans also took issue with Gore’s “targeted tax cuts,” which, they argued, amounted basically to spending items. One of his “tax cuts” is an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit — which Domenici says is really “a welfare program.” Gore also calls his “Retirement Savings Plus Plan” a tax cut. In this program, the federal government would match the retirement contributions of poor and middle-class workers with tax credits.
Unlike current IRA or 401(k) plans, Gore’s system would give “tax cuts” to many people who aren’t paying taxes, and among those who are, the lower a worker’s taxes, the larger his “tax cut.”
Domenici said, “I don’t know why the vice president continues to call that a ‘tax cut.’ It obviously isn’t.”
Domenici also argued that the complex system of new tax credits Gore is proposing will make the tax code hopelessly confusing.
The press conference came in the midst of an appropriations season in which Congress, under pressure from the White House and many of its own appropriators, is once again breaking the budget caps it set for itself two years ago. Gramm, one of the leading budget hawks in Congress, was hesitant to criticize his fellow Republicans’ spending habits during their unified assault on Al Gore’s proposals. But elsewhere he has accused his colleagues of participating in “a bidding war to buy votes in rural America,” in their haste to attach more “emergency” spending to the recent agriculture bill.
Gore’s plan is available
online, as is the Senate’s
analysis of the program.
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