Campaigns Ducking Issues by Swapping Dubious Allegations - Murray's WSJ

[question everything]

April 6, 2004

POLITICAL CAPITAL
By ALAN MURRAY

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The Bush-Cheney campaign spent the week attacking John Kerry's 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax. It ran grainy black-and-white television advertisements in battleground states ridiculing the idea as "wacky." And it won the Howard Dean Web-savvy award of the week by concocting a clever calculator that lets you see how much the new tax would cost you, in your own car, on a particular trip. The "Kerry Gas Tax Calculator" figured that a trip to visit my mother in Chattanooga, Tenn., in my Mini Cooper, would cost me an additional $21.33 in gas taxes -- and it provided driving directions as a bonus.

Problem is that Sen. Kerry hasn't proposed, never voted for and doesn't support a 50-cent gas tax. The origins of the attack are a Boston Globe article, written a decade ago, about a report by the nonpartisan "Concord Coalition" which left Sen. Kerry off its "honor roll" for deficit reduction. An enterprising reporter by the name of Jill Zuckman, now at the Chicago Tribune, cornered Sen. Kerry in the U.S. Capitol to get his response. He was irritated at being left off the list and said the Concord Coalition's grading didn't accurately reflect "my $43 billion package of cuts or my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax." Neither Ms. Zuckman nor Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, are aware of exactly when or where Sen. Kerry expressed his support for this tax increase. The strange episode might be seen as further evidence of Sen. Kerry's desire to be on all sides of every issue. But it's a huge stretch to suggest he currently supports a 50-cents-a-gallon tax.

Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign spent the week touting its plan to "create 10 million jobs" over the next four years.... Never mind the apples and kumquats nature of this comparison. The bigger question is: Exactly what would John Kerry do to have such an effect on job creation? His proposal to reduce the tax deferral that companies get for their overseas earnings and use that revenue to cut the corporate tax rate, isn't a bad one. But no serious economist would argue that it would have a major effect on job creation. A version of his new-jobs tax credit was tried during the Carter administration, with marginal success. Truth is, while 10 million jobs in four years is a reasonable goal, there's little the government can or will do to make it happen.

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Mr. Bush's credibility on the deficit-cutting front is shot. He has continued to allow large increases in spending, even as he has pushed for more tax cuts. A veto of the pork-laden highway bill that passed the House last week would be a step in the right direction -- but just the beginning of a long hike. A recognition that the U.S. probably can't afford to make all his tax cuts permanent -- something many Republican senators already have acknowledged in their support for new "pay as you go" rules -- would help, too.

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