Bush Could Use Town Cries

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 2, 2000 | by John Elvin

It may be a little bit strange that a newspaper has to explain why one candidate's tax proposals are head and shoulders above the other candidate's proposals. You'd think GOP candidate George W. Bush would jump out there and say, "Wake up and smell the coffee, America!" (or something even more clever) to draw attention to the facts. But so far he's left it to the whiz kids at the Wall Street Journal to do the "`splainin'." That means a heck of a lot of people are going to miss the message.

So let's take up some of the slack. The Wall Street Journal points out that Al Gore's plan fails to cut the mustard on several important points. It's not fair to those who should get money back. It's not fair to low-income taxpayers. It's not fair to all of us who have had it up to here with the ifs, ands and buts of small print that always accompany so-called tax cuts.

In a careful analysis of the Bush plan, the newspaper showed how it will help taxpayers all the way down the line, without the behavior-modification gimmicks that Gore insists upon. Under the Gore plan, for instance, parents would have to place their children in a federally approved day-care facility. If they drop the kid off at grandma's, however, no cut.

Bush's tax plan benefits every single one of the 94 million taxpayers across the board by cutting the percentages for each category of income and reducing the categories from five to four. It provides the most relief to low-income taxpayers, cutting their rate from 15 percent to 10 percent.

Bush's plan even helps the 30 million people who don't make enough income to pay income taxes but have to file because they pay Social Security taxes. Bush would return 2 to 3 percentage points of Social Security payroll taxes to the worker's individual investment accounts -- money that becomes real and private property. Thus, the Bush plan helps 124 million people. "That's 80 million more than under Vice President Gore's plan," notes the Journal.

Gore's estate-tax reform can be shown to benefit less than 1 percent of current heirs; his assistance to those caring for elderly parents hinges in part on health assessments approved by the Treasury secretary; his efforts on behalf of married couples would exclude 54 percent of those filing.

The Gore tax plan, the analysis concludes, is "a mishmash of entitlement programs deploying the IRS to micromanage the American household."

Hey, there, Georgie Boy, you should be shouting this stuff from the rooftops.