Dole and taxes - Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and his long history of tax legislation

National Review, April 8, 1996 by Stephen Moore

For better and for worse, America's tax structure as we approach century's end has Bob Dole's fingerprints all over it.

'I'VE GOT some good news and some bad news," Bob Dole often quipped in private during the Reagan years. "The good news is that a bus carrying a group of supply-side economists drove over a cliff and all aboard were killed. The bad news is that there were three empty seats."

Bob Dole is the first person in Washington to acknowledge that Bob Dole is no supply-side tax-cutter. In fact, for nearly twenty years now Bob Dole has been tangling with the anti-tax forces in the Republican Party. It was a back-bench Republican named Newt Gingrich who, after Dole steered the odious 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) through Congress, smacked the Kansas senator with the title that has stuck for all these years: "the tax collector for the welfare state."

But Dole's record is more complicated than that. Yes, as Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes have been saying, Bob Dole has voted for 19 tax increases in his 35 years in Congress, adding up to a Mount Everest-sized $962-billion increase in the tax burden. But Dole is quick to retort: "I've voted against sixty tax increases." Most recently, he fought like a pit bull against Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike. Moreover, Dole skillfully quarterbacked Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax-cut package through the Senate Finance Committee. And Dole was the original Senate sponsor of the key provision of the 1981 tax bill that indexed tax brackets to inflation -- ending a decade of stealth tax increases on the middle class.

The truth is that there has scarcely been a single tax bill --whether cutting the burden or raising it -- over the past twenty years that doesn't have Bob Dole's imprint on it. As Republican strategists prepare to skewer Clinton in the fall campaign for enacting "the largest tax hike in world history," they would just as soon forget that their own candidate helped bully through Congress the next three largest peacetime tax increases in history.

All of this is to say that as voters prepare to spend the next seven months searching for the soul of Bob Dole, his voluminous tax record is a good place to start looking.

Let us begin with TEFRA. Enacted on the heels of the triumphant passage of the Reagan tax cuts, this $100-billion three-year tax hike reflected the panic of GOP moderates over the escalating deficits caused by the 1981 - 82 recession. Dole championed the tax hike with great gusto. He then -- with the help of White House aides Jim Baker, Michael Deaver, David Stockman, and, yes, Richard Darman -- persuaded Ronald Reagan to accept the promise of $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax hikes. Dole then somehow persuaded every Republican on the Finance Committee to vote for the election-year tax hike, while all the Democrats on the committee and on the floor voted nay. Dole pleaded for replenishing the federal beast's food supply by stating: "We Republicans have a responsibility to show leadership, to legislate effectively, and to keep the public interest always before us." (Republicans, be warned: Throughout the last 15 years, Dole's favorite euphemism for raising taxes has been "leadership.")

TEFRA proved to be a wholesale surrender in the Reagan crusade to cut big government. The $3 of spending cuts was always a fairy tale -- in fact, spending accelerated and deficits doubled in TEFRA's wake. The praise for TEFRA from the Left should have been a tip-off. The Washington Post called it "bold and reasoned"; The New Republic labeled it "Democratic in spirit."

But most of the liberals' praise was reserved for Bob Dole himself. George McGovern admired the way "Dole has grown in office." The New Republic wrote: "Who would have thought that Sen. Bob Dole, bad boy Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1976 and co-perpetrator with Ronald Reagan of the rich people's tax bonanza, would emerge as the tax hero of 1982? Well, it's happened . . . to the horror of right-wing ideologues." The most honest assessment came from then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski. "Let's face it," he beamed, "Republicans wrote a tax bill that has been in the bottom drawer of Democratic tax reformers for years."

TEFRA ignited internecine warfare within the GOP. Sophomore Rep. Newt Gingrich publicly called the Dole bill "a turkey" and added: "I was elected in 1978 and 1980 to help build a team that would cut spending, cut taxes, and bring government spending under control. But now in 1982 people who think like me are being asked (by people I used to think thought like me) to give up strategic principle for tactical muddling through . . ." Dole's eternal nemesis Jack Kemp corralled Gingrich and seventy other conservative House members who pledged to reject what they called the "largest legislated peacetime tax increase in history."

Conservatives outside Congress also revolted. The Heritage Foundation called the bill a "breach of faith." Columnist Pat Buchanan fumed that this "disastrous" bill is "a Republican surrender of the principles of supply-side economics: a confession their adversaries were right all along." Most savage in his critique was William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote: "Robert Dole . . . has baptized the bill as a Republican measure so that Republicans will have the choice of explaining to their constituents that either a) Americans are undertaxed; or b) Reagan made an awful ass of himself in 1981 by asking for more tax reductions than he should have done." He concluded presciently: "The Dole tax bill means the collapse of Reaganomics."