By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
October 2, 2000
Early in this election year, polls showed that the most important characteristic the public wanted in its president, after 8 years of Bill Clinton, was one who would tell them the truth. As we near the end of the campaigns, it seems that trying to determine which candidate is telling the truth is still probably more important than their campaign promises.
With that in mind, Al Gore's comments on the Larry King Live show, in response to King's seemingly amiable questions, are a bit contradictory, to say the least. On the one hand, Gore was really trying hard to portray himself as pro-family while simultaneously maintaining such obviously anti-family positions as abortion on demand and defining a gay couple as a "family." Larry King asked if he considered homosexual couples a family and Gore responded, "Absolutely!" While supporting a woman right to choose abortion, right up to the ninth month of pregnancy, he opposes families having the right to choose their children's education through vouchers. While admitting that the entertainment industry "have declared some of their products -videogames, movies, records as unsuitable for young children and then …turned around and spent lots of money pushing those same products without the parents' awareness straight to the young children," he still saw no conflict of interest in taking large contributions from those same people.
Gore claimed on the one hand that he favors campaign finance reform, yet still sees nothing particularly wrong with his having broken EXISTING campaign finance laws in 1996 that go back almost 100 years when he took foreign money funneled through Buddhist nuns who had taken a vow of poverty. He claims to favor "tax breaks for the middle class" and accuses George Bush of "giving a tax break to the wealthiest 1%" because the Bush plan is an across the board tax cut for all.
Yet, Gore also advocates new federal spending bills that will cost the working people, who, he admits, "are working harder. They are working more hours. They are getting less sleep. They are having a harder time balancing work and family" billions of dollars more. He wants to create a socialized prescription drug program for "all seniors" including that wealthiest 1%, that will cost billions of dollars. Then, to make sure that the younger generation spend more time working to pay the higher taxes, he wants to create another socialized education program - "universal preschool."
He said, "I devote a lot of new resources, because we don't squander them on that big tax cut for the wealthy. I make it a No. 1 priority and devote a lot of new resources to the classroom." He claimed that, with local control, "localities don't have the resources to do what's needed" and "The average salary, according to one study, for a starting teacher nationwide is about $25,000. The average salary for professionals that have comparable education and training is about $35,000."
Of course, the average school teacher has an annual on-the-job work load of 180 days a year and the average young professional works 200 days a year, if they are lucky. Most of them work longer hours and more days of the week. Teachers have the summer off. Other young professionals don't. However, the traditional solution to any and all problems in education, the Democrats seem to believe, is to promise the teachers' unions more money.
However, perhaps the most blatantly false statement he made last week was to a caller from Billings, Montana who said:
My question is, I would like to know what Mr. Gore and Mr. Lieberman's intentions are regarding the marriage tax penalty."KING: An you just mentioned it.
GORE: Yes, oh, I -I think that it ought to be eliminated.
KING: The president vetoed it, though.
GORE: Well, but the - the version, Larry, that was vetoed included a lot of tax cut proposals that went to people who weren't even married - - and they called it the marriage penalty bill - - and a lot more people who are married, but didn't pay any marriage penalty. So it was kind of a Trojan-horse proposal. The popular thing that everybody basically agrees with was loaded up with all this other stuff that tilted up the income ladder.
Only that just flat out was not true. The bill Clinton vetoed simply eliminated the tax penalty on all married couples. Most married couples are not wealthy, so naturally most of the people who would receive the benefit of the bill are not wealthy. The bill simply doubled the standard deduction for married people. Instead of making the standard deduction for married people one and a half times the individual deduction, it would make it double the individual deduction, which means both the wealthy and the middle class would get the same dollar amount break. If the standard deduction for an individual is $5000, a married couple, regardless of income, would simply double that amount, giving them the same tax as two single people living together, including two homosexuals or lesbians living together. The bill Clinton vetoed was H.R. 4810. All 219 Republicans, 51 Democrats and 1 Independent voted for it. In the Senate it was a straight party line vote, with 54 Republicans voting for it and 45 Democrats voting against it. During the debate on the bill 39 Amendments, most of them offered by Democrats, were voted on. They were mostly amendments designed to obstruct or block passage of the bill such as:
S.AMDT.3847 to H.R.4810 -Sen. Harkin -To amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex.S.AMDT.3848 to H.R.4810 - Sen. Kennedy -To amend title XIX and XXI of the Social Security Act to permit States to expand coverage under the medicaid program and SCHIP to parents of enrolled children, and for other purposes.
S.AMDT.3853 to H.R.4810 - Sen. Robb-To make the bill effective upon enactment of a Medicare prescription drug benefit.
S.AMDT.3856 to H.R.4810- Sen. Torricelli - To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to lower the adjusted gross income threshold for deductible disaster casualty losses to 5 percent, to make such deduction an above-the-line deduction, to allow an election to take such deduction for the preceding or succeeding year, and to eliminate the marriage penalty for individuals suffering casualty losses.
However, almost all the amendments were rejected and the final bill was very short - a mere 8757 bytes, about 3 pages long. Its provisions would have done the following:
7/19/2000--Conference report filed in House.
Marriage Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000 - States that no amendment made by this Act shall be treated as a tax rate change for purposes of section 15 (effect of changes on tax rates) of the Internal Revenue Code.
(Sec. 2) Amends the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) to provide that the basic standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly shall be twice the basic standard deduction for an unmarried individual, beginning in 2000.
(Sec. 3) Provides that the 15 percent regular income tax bracket for a married couple filing jointly shall be twice the size of the corresponding bracket for an unmarried individual. Sets forth a graduated phase-in beginning in 2000 and fully effective in 2004.
(Sec. 4) Increases the beginning point of the phase-out range of the earned income credit for married couples filing jointly by $2,000, beginning in 2000.
(Sec. 5) Revises provisions concerning the allowance of nonrefundable personal tax credits to provide that the aggregate amount of such credits shall not exceed the sum of: (1) the taxpayer's regular tax liability for the taxable year reduced by the foreign tax credit; and (2) the alternative minimum tax.
(Sec. 6) States that the amendments made by this Act shall not be taken into account under IRC provisions relating to failure to pay estimated tax in determining the amount of any installment required to be paid before October 1, 2000.
(Sec. 7) Sets forth "Budget Act" compliance provisions (sunset provisions).
So, what Al Gore really advocated in his chat with Larry King was to maintain the Federal government's preferential treatment for unmarried and homosexual couples. They will continue to pay less tax than a heterosexual married couple. That is the issue. That sort of tax advantage given to unmarried couples has made getting married a financial liability for young people in love.
There simply WAS no "other stuff that tilted up the income ladder" as claimed by Al Gore and, unfortunately, Larry King didn't ask him what "other stuff" he was talking about.
At issue here is, once again, the state of America's culture. Al Gore represents a governing and cultural view that developed over the year that puts the Federal government in control of a growing percentage of the earned income of the average working person. It simply costs a whole lot more money for the government to take care of pre-school children than it does for their mothers to take care of them. But, the government's need for more and more money under the Gore philosophy requires that babies in their earliest years be put in government day care so their mothers can get to work and pay taxes.
But, perhaps even more of an issue is the fact that Al Gore lied about HR 4810. The "other stuff" that he claimed made it a bad bill was not identified and, again he got away with a blatant misstatement of fact. It simply is NOT a tax break for the wealthy. Is a couple makes $40,000 with both of them working, or they make millions, their standard deduction will be exactly the same. The average of $1400 each couple, rich or middle class (the poor don't pay income taxes) means a whole lot more to a young couple making $40,000 than it does to a couple making $1,000,000 a year. The standard deduction does not go up for wealthy people so Al Gore's claim that marriage tax proposal needed to be vetoed because it was mostly a benefit for the wealthy or that "a lot of the tax proposals that went to people who weren't married" are simply not true.
Do we really want another four to eight years of that?
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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