Politics: The Ten Percent Solution
Norquist, Grover G.
PO LIT by Grover G. Norquist The Ten Percent Solution he battle lines are clear again. Bill T Clinton has reverted to form as a tax-and-spend liberal. In his 77-minute State of the Union address...
...Six Republican governors —Arizona's Jane Hull, Mississippi's Kirk Fordice, New Jersey's Christie Whitman, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge, North Dakota's Edward Schafer, and Oklahoma's Frank Keating —have written to Congress in support of the federal supermajority amendment...
...In the Senate, Finance Committee Chair William Roth and Rod Grams have introduced the "Tax Cuts for All Americans Act" to cut income tax rates io percent...
...Anchored to the left, Clinton has limited flexibility...
...If this debate continues through next year, the next attorney general will be a Republican, and boy will he—or she —be busy...
...That works out to about $58 billion a minute...
...The Clinton "plan" would simply use general revenues to temporarily prop up the present system...
...William Roth, of Roth IRA fame, will introduce legislation to increase from $2,000 to $5,000 the amount taxpayers can save each year in IRAs, eliminate current income limitations on who can invest in IRAs, and increase to $15,000 the amount taxpayers can put into 401(k) and 4o3(b) plans...
...No Democratic governor has been heard from...
...Two-thirds of the American people oppose this scheme, and Clinton knows it has no support in Congress...
...Just in time, congressional Republicans are regaining their sea legs as tax cutters...
...On or around April 15, Congress will vote a fifth time on the amendment sponsored in the House by Republicans Joe Barton and John Shadegg and Democrats Virgil Goode and Ralph Halland, and in the Senate by Jon Kyl.44 Just in time, Senate and House Republicans are regaining their sea legs as tax cutters...
...In Wisconsin, Gov...
...If Democrats offered to spend money on inner cities, Republicans countered with urban enterprise zones—tax cuts targeted to a region...
...It was an expensive lesson: five Senate seats and fifteen House seats lost to bad policy and bad politics...
...Pete Domenici of all people announced on "Meet the Press" January 17 that he supports an across-the-board cut beginning at 4 percent and rising to 15 percent over the next ten years, returning $600 billion of the surplus to taxpayers...
...In his 77-minute State of the Union address he spent $4.47 trillion in projected surpluses over the next fifteen years...
...The American Spectator March 1999 67...
...The GOP focus on across-the-board reductions is also a change from the targeted tax credits of 1997, when Republicans bestowed tax benefits on parents with children under age 16 and limited Individual Retirement Account tax benefits to individuals earning under $6o,000 or couples earning less than $loo,000...
...Alaska's Tony Knowles is pushing to institute an income tax...
...Massachusetts Gov...
...Now Clinton is using targeted tax relief in an effort to ward off Republican calls for across-the-board cuts...
...And New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen wants a statewide tax on income, sales, or property to cover her spending spree of the past two years...
...with the Republican Revolution...
...James Gilmore continues his drive to phase out the car tax, which will save taxpayers $1 billion per year by 2002...
...Class envy will never be the same...
...Last November a Massachusetts measure to cut the state tax on "unearned" income—interest and dividends —from 12 percent to 5.95 percent won 84 percent of the vote...
...Now that 46 percent of Americans directly own shares of stock, the politics of expanding IRAs and reducing taxes on capital have changed dramatically...
...Steve Largent to Clinton's address on behalf of Republicans, endorsed the io-percent cut as well as elimination of inheritance taxes...
...Maryland's Parris Glendening wants to delay the income tax cut he promised before his tough re-election last year and to again hike cigarette taxes...
...Speaker Hastert will also lead a drive to require a supermajority for any future tax hikes...
...There's been a longer-term shift in the politics of tax credits, as well...
...Virginia Gov...
...As Republicans in Washington signal their distance from Clinton and most Democrats by supporting broad-based tax cuts, death-tax abolition, reductions in taxes on capital, and the supermajority requirement, they are merely echoing the fight Republican governors and state legislators have been waging in their states...
...Michigan's Engler has asked the Republican-controlled legislature to reduce the personal income tax rate from 4.4 percent to 3.9 percent, which will save taxpayers $3 billion in the next five years...
...Republicans and Democrats who hoped Clinton would seize this last opportunity to reform Social Security as his other presidential legacy were rudely disappointed...
...Connie Morella is reintroducing her legislation to allow federal workers to add up to $10,000 to their Thrift Savings Plans — 4o1(k)s for government workers...
...Arizona's Hull is proposing to cut the corporate income tax rate from 8 percent to 7.75 percent...
...Meanwhile, Governors Ridge, Schafer, Whitman, George Pataki of New York, and John Engler of Michigan have publicly announced campaigns to enact supermajority constitutional amendments in their own states...
...Fritz Hollings calls a "Ponzi scheme"—the Clinton plan would open the door to unprecedented corruption and social engineering...
...Republican initiatives will also reduce taxes on investments and savings...
...Jennifer Dunn, responding with Rep...
...Bill Clinton and the Democrats want to spend more...
...Paul Cellucci plans to reduce the state's flat tax rate from 5.95 percent to 5 percent—finally undoing Michael Dukakis's "temporary" tax hike of more than a decade ago...
...This way Clinton can be for tax cuts, while targeting them to small groups to "lose" the least amount of tax revenue...
...Here's how the traditionally left-wing Massachusetts League of Women Voters endorsed the tax cut: "In the 1990's when persons at all income levels rely on investment income for children's education and retirement, this state's penalization of savings makes no sense...
...Jon Kyl are reintroducing legislation to abolish the death tax immediately...
...In the 1970's and 8o's Republicans used tax credits—which avoids creating a bureaucracy filled with Democratic precinct workers—to compete with Democratic spending plans...
...Bill Owen is proposing a permanent cut in the income tax rate from 5 percent to 4.75 percent...
...Chris Cox and Sen...
...In the last Congress the Lock and load: Clinton is Reaganizing the GOP 66 March 1999 • The American Spectator bill had 190 House co-sponsors and 3o in the Senate...
...Last year, Domenici was a leader of the successful effort to prevent a Senate vote on tax cut legislation that had passed the House before the fall elections...
...He's been the amendment's strongest supporter over the past four years...
...Colorado's new GOP Gov...
...Budget Committee Chair (and presidential hopeful) John Kasich has introduced a bill to cut individual rates by 10 percent...
...We could give it back to you and hope you spend it right," Clinton told a gathering, but the government couldn't be sure of this...
...Now Clinton is again steering to port—and hard...
...By having the federal government invest directly in American companies — what South Carolina Democratic Sen...
...R epublican plans don't end with the io-percent tax cut...
...He did the same on becoming president, only to be slapped down by voters two years later GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Tommy Thompson cut tax rates 2.5 percent last year and is working to reduce them by io percent by 2002...
...The GOP's commitment to serious tax cutting was confirmed when Sen...
...Republicans at all levels want to cut taxes...
...He needs their undying loyalty to weather future scandals (or resurfacing old ones), and he needs their support to elect Al Gore in z000 and keep the Justice Department in safe hands...
...If Democrats wanted to spend tax dollars on child care, Republicans offered a tax credit for the same...
...Speaker Dennis Hastert has listed abolishing the death tax high on his priority list, and Dunn and Tennessee Democrat John Tanner are promoting legislation to phase out the death tax by cutting the current 55 percent rate by 5 percent a year over the next ten years, wiping the tax out in the eleventh...
...Too many Americans—and too many Republican voters—found that the GOP's "targeted" tax cuts were targeted to exclude them...
...Roth would also allow "catch up" contributions to pensions for workers who leave the workforce for several years...
...Republican governors and state legislators are promoting across-the-board rate reductions, too...
...The next day in Buffalo, he belittled the idea of giving the surplus back to taxpayers...
...Democratic governors are moving in the opposite direction...
...Republican leaders in the House and Senate now say they've learned that they should have run on a platform of across-the-board tax cuts last year...
...When Clinton was first elected governor in 1978 he cockily veered to the left and was defeated two years later...
...If the last two years blurred the differences between Republicans and Democrats, we are back to Ronald Reagan's standard of bold colors rather than pale pastels...
...There is an emerging consensus in both houses for a io percent across-the-board cut in marginal rates...
...Ben Nighthorse Campbell has introduced companion legislation in the Senate...
...The GOP goal, on the other hand, is to "lose" as much revenue as possible to taxpayers...
...Even if Clinton survives the Senate trial he will remain hostage to the core financial interests of the Democratic Party: trial lawyers, labor union leaders, and big city machines...
...Without reforms that allow younger Americans to invest some or all of their FICA taxes, the system cheats these workers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime...
...Fifteen states have already abolished their death taxes...
Vol. 32 • March 1999 • No. 3
