Democrats-with Republican support-voted last week to extend more than $5 billion worth of extra benefits to the long-term unemployed. Bush may sign the bill but not declare the budget emergency necessary to release the funds. Democrats argue that “emergency” exemptions were made for Kurdish refugees, so why not for U.S. workers?
Most “tax relief” bills aim at working families with children. A measure sponsored by Sen. Albert Gore Jr. and Rep. Thomas Downey would create a refundable $800-per-child tax credit, paid for with a new top income-tax rate of 35 percent for families with taxable incomes over $110,000. Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller proposes a $1,000-per-child credit, but hasn’t said how to pay for it. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen would liberalize tax breaks for Individual Retirement Accounts, making contributions up to $2,000 fully deductible and allowing penalty-free withdrawals for first homes, education and catastrophic medical bills. It’s expensive: $25.8 billion over five years.
The Democratic bottom line on taxes is murky. House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski last week pushed through his committee a five-cent-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax, but outraged tax-cut Democrats may kill it. And while higher taxes on the “truly wealthy” would be popular, Republican$ will pounce if Democrats aren’t careful about precisely who pays more.
Rep. Richard Gephardt wants to create a $16 billion fund to pay bounties to states whose high-school seniors’ math and science scores meet the highest international standards. Sen. Bill Bradley want to make all college students eligible for federally guaranteed loans, regardless of family income. He wants to help pay for the change with a new “millionaire’s tax.”
Everyone’s rushing to design something. It’s a “political sputnik,” said a House Democratic leadership aide. Rockefeller endorses a " pay or play" system: employers would provide health benefits or pay extra payroll taxes to fund an expanded federal system. But Democrats need to be careful, cautions Democratic strategist Carter Eskew. “We have to say, ‘We’re cutting your health-care costs’.”
The new “middle class” campaign is serious, but it’s also nakedly political. If Bush vetoes their bills, so much the better, Democrats say. “We can draw the distinctions,” says Gephardt. That may help make their case. But only a Democrat in the White House can turn rhetoric into reality-and win back the middle class Democrats say they want to serve. DEMO-LITION DERBY
Only one Democrat-Paul Tsongas-is in the presidential race so far, but some possible contenders are already bashing one another to show who’s the toughest of them all.
It could be “a risk” to hold the 1992 convention in New York if “it looks like the Democrats are basically shipping more money into status quo programs and interests that don’t work.”
“If you make me answer his quotes, he’s a dead man.”
“Why should the American people believe a political preacher whose fiscal practices bear no resemblance to his sermons?”
Inheritors of the Hubert Humphrey wing of the party.
“Amen, brother. I welcome it because that is the Democratic Part-Y.”
“I call that Twinkie economics. Twinkies taste great, have no nutritutional value. That’s what the Democrats, left to their own devices, will give the American people in 1992.”
“Little ideas parading under the banner of the ’new’ in hopes that no one will notice how small they truly are.”
