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 Gores
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 Gores 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 Bushs
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.
Thats Gores windfall for the "rich.
As the above indicates, facts get in the way of Gores 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 Bushs 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 theyll 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, Bushs 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 Bushs 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 Gores "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?
HENCH adds: Al Gore is a risky tax scheme. Oh, and a bald-faced LIAR!
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