QandO

June 28, 2004

Domestic Agendas
Posted by Jon Henke

The liberal Brookings Institute puts together a bipartisan panel to evaluate the domestic and economic agendas of both Bush and Kerry. The results are not pretty...

In an effort to get to the substance of the presidential campaign, a Brookings panel this morning took a magnifying glass to the domestic policies of both Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. The panelists verdict: the health-care, education, and economic agendas of both candidates aimed for the political center, and the differences between the two were mostly minor and designed to appeal to the candidate's base. Panelists also agreed that flaws exists in the agendas of both candidates, with neither adequately addressing the larger issue of fiscal responsibility.

Although Bush and Kerry have different approaches to the economy, both Bush and Kerry would increase the federal deficit, according to the Urban Institute's Leonard Burman. Kerry wants to repeal tax cuts for people who earn more than $200,000—something Bush rejects—but supports Bush's middle class tax cuts.

"The two plans, in terms of their overall affect on the budget, are not that much more different," Burman said. "Basically, we're talking about a trillion dollars in additions to the deficit from the proposals of both camps."

*** Kerry has proposed an education trust fund of $200 billion spread over ten years to pay for education reforms and new programs, but his call for $30 billion over ten years to increase teacher salaries would not result in serious raises, according to Brookings Senior Fellow Tom Loveless.

*** Jack Meyer, president of the Economic and Social Research Institute, said both Kerry and Bush needed to refine their health-care proposals. "The overall problem is that Senator Kerry and his advisors may not have always selected the best means to get to good ends," Meyer said. He noted that Kerry's plan to rearrange federal and state responsibility for health care coverage "is very complicated and it's going to set off some concern in the states." Meyer said Bush's $1,000 tax credit for individuals was too small. The President, Meyer said, should "scale up his set of plans, get a bigger vision, and a bolder plan."

*** Putting aside the particulars of each candidate's domestic agendas, panelists were close to unanimity in their contention that the United States' burgeoning federal deficits were not seriously being addressed by either candidate.

*** Brookings Senior Fellow Isabel Sawhill said that the Administration's budget is "based on unrealistic assumptions on the cost of war, the need to fix the alternative minimum tax, and other issues." In addition, Sawhill said Bush's continued push for tax cuts and his "miserable record on curbing spending" didn't bode well for deficit reduction.

She was critical of Kerry as well, noting that his revenue savings would likely be dwarfed by his proposed additional spending on both education ($200 billion) and health care ($700 billion). Moreover, Sawhill said, these price tags "are probably on the low side."
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Coming from a liberal think-tank, this is a fairly credible and damning evaluation of both candidates...but especially of John Kerry. Even supporters of Bush tend to admit he is acting, to say the least, fiscally irresponsible. Critics agree, though the two sides disagree on what exactly constitutes that irresponsibility.

However, for that criticism to matter, Bush's critics have to support a more fiscally responsible plan...and, it's fairly clear they do not. To put it another way, Democrats are not upset that the President is being fiscally irresponsible...they're upset that the Republican President is being fiscally irresponsible.

That's different, you know.

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