Article...Gore’s Tax Lies Exposed
NewsMax.com
Friday, Sept. 1, 2000
newsmax.com
Like his mentor Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore has serious difficulties when it comes to telling the truth.
The man who lied about inventing the Internet, being a model for the novel "Love Story" and discovering Love Canal littered his acceptance speech with falsehoods, as former Federal Reserve governor Lawrence B. Lindsey points out in the Wall Street Journal.
Lindsey, an adviser to George W. Bush, cited as one glaring example of Gore’s compulsive truth twisting his claim that under the Bush tax cut "the average family would get about enough money to buy one extra diet Coke a week - about 62 cents and change."
That whopper was even too much for Gore’s own people, who the very next day were forced to admit that what the vice president really meant to say was "one extra diet Coke a day,” not a week as he had disingenuously declared.
As Lindsey wrote, under the Bush tax cut plan the real average American family - one smack in the middle on the income scale and having a mom, dad and a couple of kids - would get a tax cut of at least $1,600 a year or 80 cents per hour, ”not per day or per week.”
Moreover, real wages of the average American production worker over the past eight years of the Clinton/Gore administration have increased a mere 47 cents an hour, a very inconvenient fact that Gore seems to have found necessary to befuddle because Bush’s 80-cents-an-hour tax break would make the vice president look less the champion of the American working family.
In his transparent effort to stir up class warfare, Gore is traveling around the nation claiming that the Bush tax cut proposal is some kind of windfall for those greedy so-called rich folks that wealthy liberals such as Gore so enjoy demonizing.
But a look at the Bush proposals as explained by Lindsey tells a slightly different story.
"Married families with two children making less than $36,000 get a 100% income tax cut,” he wrote.
A similar family earning $50,000 gets about a 50% cut in their taxes.
If they earn $75,000 their taxes get cut by about 25%.
If they are taking in $150,000 the same family gets a 19% tax cut and at $250,000 they get a 13% tax cut.
Single-parent families with two children and incomes under $31,000 will pay no income tax at all. Married couples with two children with incomes under $36,000 will pay no income tax. Altogether, one in five families with children - 6 million families - will be wiped off the income tax rolls.
That’s Gore’s windfall for the "rich.”
As the above indicates, facts get in the way of Gore’s attempt to set Americans against their fellow Americans in the kind of class warfare that was supposed to have died with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lindsey asks the Gore campaign to follow Bush’s lead in laying out the full details of his fiscal policies and making them available to the American people.
Since Bush wants to "enact some common-sense reforms in the areas of taxation, Social Security, education and national defense,” he has taken three steps to give the people the unvarnished facts.
First, in December his campaign "installed a tax calculator at the georgewbush.com Web site.” The simple-to-use calculator, which is completely private, allows taxpayers earning up to $100,000 to figure out how much they’ll save under the Bush proposal. Everyone has full access to the Web site, including the media.
Second, the Bush campaign has asked nonpartisan scorekeepers to calculate the cost of their proposals. "In the case of taxes, the staff of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation calculated the revenue figures we use.”
Third, Bush’s people have published a 457-page volume containing detailed fact sheets about each of Bush's proposals. This has been distributed to members of the press.
Lindsey says that the Gore campaign has taken none of these steps, and no wonder. "When Gore supporter Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice tried to model the Gore tax plan, he gave up, saying that the plan has 'so many esoteric things, I'd have to make up the data,'" leading one to wonder just where Gore gets his numbers.
Lindsey concludes by adding that under Bush’s plan, nobody is asked to do anything to qualify for a tax cut. After all, he notes, "cutting taxes means giving people their own money back.”
On the other hand, getting in line for one of Gore’s "targeted” tax cuts is so complicated that McIntyre, the Gore supporter, called it "a whole bunch of government spending programs run by the Internal Revenue Service."
According to Lindsey, Gore says he wants to make sure that only the "right people" get a tax cut.” Who, Lindsey asked "are the right people, Mr. Gore, other than the people who paid the taxes in the first place?” |
