Dole and Taxes

‘I’VE GOT some good news and some bad news,” Bob Dole often quipped in private during the Reagan years. “The good news is that a bus carrying a group of supply-side economists drove over a cliff and all aboard were killed. The bad news is that there were three empty seats.”

Bob Dole is the first person in Washington to acknowledge that Bob Dole is no supply-side tax-cutter. In fact, for nearly twenty years now Bob Dole has been tangling with the anti-tax forces in the Republican Party. It was a backbench Republican named Newt Gingrich who, after Dole steered the odious 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) through Congress, smacked the Kansas senator with the title that has stuck for all these years: “the tax collector for the welfare state.”