Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: One More Veto= Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 05:06:14 EST Message-ID: <5.1992Nov6.050614@AmeriCast.com> One More Veto= THE PRESIDENT'S veto of the tax bill the day after the election gave the clearest possible expression to the intellectual gridlock that helped produce the results of the night before. The problem was not the veto itself; the bill deserved to be vetoed. The impulse behind it had long since ceased to be to deliver the urban aid that had been its original rationale. Rather, its cost- liest provisions would have given the better-off billions of dol- lars in long-term tax cuts (through restored and expanded IRAs or individual retirement accounts) that the Treasury couldn't afford and the legislation made no move to recoup. The veto was therefore good policy - but the reasons for it were not. The president was saying again that the country can have its fiscal cake and eat it too - but it can't. He said he was with- holding his approval in part because the bill was fiscally ir- responsible, which is true enough. But he also complained that the tax increases in the bill were excessive while some of the cuts that the increases were meant to finance were too small. (The bill left out parts of his proposals for economic growth and urban aid.) Our own sense is that, far from being excessive, too many of the tax increases were mere gimmicks. But the point isn't that; it is that once again in his administration Mr. Bush wouldn't choose between the goals of lower taxes and a lower de- ficit. There's the gridlock. Bob Dole now offers improbably to resolve it, and a lot else as well. The Senate minority leader has taken his lumps over the years (including from George Bush in 1988) for trying to reduce the deficit. He will still be around when Mr. Bush is gone, will still be in office when such other claimants to lead the party in the future as Jack Kemp, who says that deficit reduction is for sissies, are off the public payroll. The day after the election Mr. Dole was industriously pointing out that Bill Clinton had failed to win a majority of the vote, that the majority rested rather with the votes of President Bush and Ross Perot combined, and that he, Bob Dole, as senior surviving Republican, could well be seen as a kind of spokesman for that combination, the point being at the very least that the surviving Republicans in Congress spoke for a larger share of the public than their numbers would suggest. But what an imaginative revision of the outcome that is. The Perot program, insofar as Mr. Perot himself could ever utter it, consisted of a proposal to balance the budget over the next five years or so by a combination of serious tax increases - a higher top income tax rate, 50 cents more a gallon on gasoline, higher income taxes on Social Security benefits, a cap on the mortgage interest deduction and much more - and across-the-board spending cuts, including in defense. Is that what the congressional Repub- licans are for? Where have they been all these years? We don't know how to split the Perot vote between the major parties, but it doesn't split the way Mr. Dole would have it. The Republicans who brought you this deficit are themselves as hoist as ever by the fiscal issue. 02:04 11-06C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. This story is from the Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar- chived or redistributed. For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor- poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)