Four years ago when George Bush proposed a 1 percent across-the-board tax cut at the Republican National Convention, Bob Dole called it crazy.
Now as a new GOP convention approaches, Dole is pondering something 15 times crazier.Dole is considering, as one would an in-flight menu, a list of possible tax reductions he would trot out for TV viewers next month. They range from the modest, a $500 tax deduction for charitable giving, to the monstrous, a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut that would cost $500 billion.
Regardless of which he chooses, it is likely that Dole will renounce the common sense that generally marked his work in the budget trenches. Now, tieless and out of the trenches, he can lob pie into the sky and not worry where it falls.
The fact that Dole would even consider a 15 percent tax cut tells us either an alien force has taken over his body and is using it as a vessel; just as he sold his soul to the Christian Coalition, he's ready to do the same with supply-side voodoo doctors.
Come to think of it, theory 1 and theory 2 are one and the same.
By now the notion of arbitrarily slashing taxes - and then somehow figuring we can just make up the difference with cuts in spending - should be hooted out of the theater.
The fact is that Dole, to his credit, was one of those doing the hooting in the Senate. He saw how the numbers added up. We had to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars annually because we didn't bring in enough revenue or find politically palatable cuts in spending. Cut taxes? E.T. phone home.
To start the 1980s we cut taxes 30 percent across the board. We spent the rest of the '80s trying to correct for that mistake.
Dole openly ridiculed true-believer supply-siders who worship tax reductions as a means of salvation.
"The good news is a busload of supply-siders went over a cliff," Dole joked when Reaganomics was young. "The bad news is that there were three empty seats."
The then-Senate majority leader said, you can't "just cut taxes and get gain without pain."
Dole knows the truth: When the federal government has more money going out than coming in, tax cuts and deficit spending are one and the same.
Nonetheless, we've seen Dole bark for the why-not notion of repealing the 1993 federal gasoline tax increase during a blip in gas prices. Also on his in-flight menu is a $500 per child tax credit.
One would think, judging by all this proposed giving back to the taxpayer, that we had Old Man Deficit whipped, that we had routed the monster and chased it into the sea. One would think that we had buckets of surplus money sitting in the Treasury basement.
What a voodoo child proposes is that we borrow not to pay for government but to pay for tax cuts, and that somehow that will make everything better.
Yes, Bill Clinton has talked of tax cuts, too, as if there's spare change just a-jingling in Uncle Sam's pockets. But Clinton approaches the tax cut - in his case tax credits for college tuition - honestly. He promotes it as spending with a direct return.
Are tax cuts good for the economy? Not so fast with your answer. Economists say that cutting tax rates may be a way to spur productivity during an economic downturn. But the economy is humming. Bob Dole knows all of this. He said so many times, even when as Senate Republican leader his allegiance was to the grandpappy of all supply-siders, Ronald Reagan.
Now he's no senator, just a civilian running for president. And the man's talking crazy.