On one level, all the back-and-forth about “shortfalls” and “projections,” “caps” and “weighted averages,” is pointless. No matter who’s elected, none of these plans will remain intact when the new Congress gets done with them. Recent history suggests that every number put out by a campaign this year will change, probably several times over. But at least when they talk about taxes and budgets, the candidates are discussing society’s fundamental economic arrangements. After all the silly squabbling, real politicsthe kind that real people might actually care aboutstill comes down to how you slice the economic pie.
George W. Bush gets that, which is why he applies his considerable skills as a campaigner to hawking his Texas tax cuts and plans for more cuts in Washington. Aboard his bus en route to Portsmouth, N.H., last week, Bush was in one of his patented moods of bristling insouciance, the kind where he manages to be bored, charming, coiled and carefree all at the same time. (The blend, which accounts for much of his popularity among those who’ve met him, doesn’t come across on television.) On this day he made a wry point about his quite radical plan to eliminate the inheritance tax that said more about his world view than a dozen debate one-liners.
Bush was answering a question about one of his favorite presidents, Teddy Roosevelt. Hadn’t Roosevelt, also a well-born governor, been the one to impose the inheritance tax in the first place? Hadn’t he worried about huge concentrations of wealth in an age not so different from our own?
Here’s a subject Bush knows something about. “The unintended consequence of the inheritance law,” he said, “was [that] it kept the fortunes intact, because people went to great lengths to have trusts and foundations and skipping generations and skipping instruments that bound up all this wealth so it never got redistributed.”
Of course, the resulting charitable foundations have done great things for the country (a point that Bush, who referred to a recent biography of John D. Rockefeller, might have grasped). And how could great wealth possibly be broken up without taxes? The governor’s response was lightning quick: “Because generations who don’t have to work would blow their inheritance.” Here he grinned, but added, “I believe that. I’m not kidding you.”
In other words, Bush is apparently counting on spoiled rich kids to redistribute income through sheer consumption and waste. If they give Daddy’s money to the Ferrari dealer, he’ll recirculate it through society. This is an unusual economic and social analysis. Bush, who spent years finding his footing among the idle rich of Midland, Texas, inverts the sensible view of TR, who believed that the children of the Gilded Age were in danger of halting American economic and spiritual progress if they didn’t get off their duffs.
Though he refers to it only in front of well-heeled crowds, Bush’s supply-side plan also includes a cut in the top income-tax rate, which will give the wealthiest 1 percent an average $50,000 annual break. Not a bad deal: if you’re rich enough to give Bush the $1,000 maximum campaign contribution, you get his commitment to support a fiftyfold return. Now, that’s serving your constituents.
Of course, in Republican politics, any criticism of relief for the rich is verboten, as John McCain is learning. His plan includes no cut in the top rate; he would set aside that money for Social Security and Medicare. But saying he’d rather give money to the elderly than the wealthy isn’t working for him. So in last Friday’s debate, McCain charged for the first time that Bush’s plan is “fiscally irresponsible.” That isn’t likely to work either. You have to go back to the pre-Reagan era to find a GOP that cares whether its tax cuts wreck the budget. If McCain falls short, it will be less because of stories about his letters to the FCC than because Bush and the GOP establishment depict the Arizonan’s tax cut as too stingy toward the middle class and too “Democratic” toward the rich.
Speaking of the Democrats, their divisions are largely academic. The great British thinker Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay, called “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” about the difference between knowing one big thing and many little things. It’s a good bet that both Bill Bradley and Al Gore have read Berlin. Bradley is playing the hedgehogconcentrating on big goals like universal health coverage. Gore, the fox, argues that presidents don’t have the luxury to focus so narrowly and have to be practical generalists. While their differences on substance may be small, this distinction would make a big difference in how each would approach the presidency. Now even philosophies of agenda setting are being used as weapons. Maybe that’s progress.
