10/16/00 3:40 p.m.
Small-Government Gore
Gore tries to get to Bush's right, and fails.

By NR's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

he Weekly Standard recently ran an editorial titled "The Era of Small Government is Over," which suggested that conservatives ought to get over their fixation with small government because nobody is interested in it. If opposition to big government has lost its appeal, however, why is Al Gore trying to identify himself with it?

Speaking in Detroit on Saturday, Gore sought to get to George W. Bush's right on the size of government. First he repeated his oft-made claim that his reinventing-government program had "reduced the federal government to the smallest size since President Kennedy's administration." He said that he would reduce it further as president, not least by paying down debt and thus reducing interest payments ("as a percentage of our national income [the federal government] will be the smallest it's been in fifty years"). And then came this eye-popper: "The other side would actually expand the role of the federal government because they have proposed not only a huge $1.6 trillion tax cut, mostly to the wealthy, but also a $1 trillion Social Security privatization proposal."

Gore did not elaborate any further on this point, proceeding instead to argue that Bush would bankrupt Social Security. It appears that the vice president meant one of three things: either 1) that Bush would bring back deficits, thus causing interest payments to go up, 2) that letting people invest Social Security funds would itself "expand the role of the federal government" because the feds would have to hire so many people to administer the private accounts, or 3) that the money that would be diverted to private Social Security accounts should count as new government spending.

The last argument is just silly, and the Gore campaign is in no position to make either of the other two. It has spent months saying that Bush wouldn't spend enough money on education, health care, or even national defense. It's just not credible that higher interest payments would more than make up for the difference between the candidates' spending levels. And if Bush would have to expand the Social Security Administration — a debatable assumption — Gore would have to hire a lot more IRS agents to administer the tax code he plans to complicate.

It is possible, depending on what definition of "the size of government" one uses, to argue that Bush and Gore would both expand the federal government (by giving it new tasks); that Bush and Gore would both shrink the federal government (as a percentage of national income); or that Bush would shrink it and Gore would expand it. Gore has taken the one position that can't possibly be right.

But he has also demonstrated that there's still some life in antistatism yet.

More Fuzzy Math
In the same Detroit address, Gore said that Bush would "spend more money on a tax cut for the wealthiest one percent than all the new spending they're proposing for health care, education, and national defense all put together." Moreover, Gore claimed that this was true even using the Bush campaign's own numbers. "They cannot dispute this, I challenge them to dispute this," he said.

They do dispute it, and they're right. Bush's budget increases spending on defense, health care, and education by $455 billion over ten years. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the Bush tax cut would save the top one percent of taxpayers $223 billion in income taxes over ten years. To reach an estimate of tax savings for the top one percent that's higher than $455 billion, Gore has to be using numbers from Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-wing group. Whether the group's numbers can be trusted is debatable, but it is certainly not a wing of the Bush campaign.

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