 |
|
 |
|
| DEBATING THE DEBATE | |
 October 4, 2000 
|
|||
|
|
MARGARET WARNER: Gwen Ifill begins our post-debate coverage with some excerpts from last night's encounter, moderated by our own Jim Lehrer. GWEN IFILL: For Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, the focus of last night's debate was clear. It was all about money: Taxpayer's money, and the candidates' competing visions for how to spend a $4.5 trillion surplus; not whether to cut taxes, but how much and for whom. VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: I think this is a very important moment for our country. We have achieved extraordinary prosperity, and in this election America has to make an important choice: Will we use our prosperity to enrich not just the few, but all of our families? I believe we have to make the right and responsible choices. If I'm entrusted with the presidency, here are the choices that I will make. I will balance the budget every year. I will pay down the national debt. I will put Medicare and Social Security in a lock box and protect them. And I will cut taxes for middle- class families. I believe it's important to resist the temptation to squander our surplus. GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: I think you're going to find the difference reflected in our budgets. I want to take one half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security, one quarter of the surplus for important projects, and I want to send one quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut, and that stands in contrast to my worthy opponent's plan, which will increase the size of government dramatically. His plan is three times larger than President Clinton's proposed plan eight years ago. It empowers Washington, and tonight you're going to hear that my passion and my vision is to empower Americans to be able to make decisions for themselves in their own lives. GWEN IFILL: Throughout the debate, Gore returned to a consistent theme, that Bush's approach would hurt the middle class. VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Under Governor Bush's tax cut proposal, he would spend more money on tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% than all of the new spending that he proposes for education, health care, prescription drugs, and national defense all combined. Now, I think those are the wrong priorities. Now, under my proposal, for every dollar that I propose in spending for things like education and health care, I will put another dollar into middle-class tax cuts. And for every dollar that I spend in those two categories, I'll put two dollars toward paying down the national debt. GWEN IFILL: Bush's response: That Gore's numbers just do not add up. GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Obviously tonight, we're going to hear some phony numbers about what I think and what we ought to do. People need to know that over the next ten years there's going to be $25 trillion of revenue that comes into our treasury, and we anticipate spending $21 trillion. And my plan says why don't we pass $1.3 trillion of that back to the people who pay the bills? Surely we can afford 5% of the $25 trillion that are coming to the Treasury to the hard-working people who pay the bills. There's a difference of opinion. It's the difference between government making decisions for you, and you getting more of your money to make decisions for yourself. GWEN IFILL: Among the differences of opinion, this potent political issue: What the federal government should do to make prescription drugs more affordable for senior citizens. GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: I've said that eight years ago, they campaigned on prescription drugs for seniors, and four years ago they campaigned on getting prescription drugs for seniors. And now they're campaigning on getting prescription drugs for seniors. It seems like they can't get it done. VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Under my plan, all seniors will get prescription drugs under Medicare. The Governor has described Medicare as a government HMO. It's not, and let me explain the difference. Under the Medicare prescription drug proposal I'm making, here's how it works: You go to your own doctor, and your doctor chooses your prescription, and no HMO or insurance company can take those choices away from you. Then you go to your own pharmacy, you fill the prescription, and Medicare pays half the cost. If you're in a very poor family, or if you have very high costs, Medicare will pay all the costs-- a $25 premium and much better benefits than you could possibly find in the private sector. Now here's the contrast: 95% of all seniors would get no help whatsoever under my opponent's plan for the first four or five years. Now one thing I don't understand, Jim, is why is it that the wealthiest 1% get their tax cuts the first year, but 95% of seniors have to wait four to five years before they get a single penny? JIM LEHRER: Governor? GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: I guess my answer to that is, the man's running on "mediscare," trying to frighten people in the in the voting booth. That's just not the way...way I think, and that's just not my intentions, and it's not my plan. I want all seniors to have prescription drugs in Medicare. We need to reform Medicare. There has been an opportunity to do so, but this administration has failed to do it. And so seniors are going to have not only a Medicare plan where the poorer seniors are going to have their prescription drugs played... paid for, but there will be a variety of options. JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you both this, and we'll move on. On this subject, as a practical matter, both of you want to bring prescription drugs to seniors, correct? GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Correct. VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Correct. But the difference is... The difference is, I want to bring it to 100%... JIM LEHRER:. All right. All right. VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: ...And he brings it only to 5%. JIM LEHRER: All right. GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: That's just totally false. GWEN IFILL: Reporter: The underlying dispute between Governor Bush and Vice President Gore often centered on their vision of what the government's role should be. JIM LEHRER: Should the voters of this election, Vice President Gore, see this in the domestic area as a major choice between competing political philosophies? VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Oh, absolutely. This is a very important moment in the history of our country. Look, we've got the biggest surpluses in all of American history. The key question that has to be answered in this election is, will we use that prosperity wisely, in a way that benefits all of our people and doesn't go just to the few? I think we need to put Medicare and Social Security in a lockbox. The Governor will not put Medicare in a lockbox. I don't think it should be used as a piggy bank for other programs. I think it needs to be moved out of the budget and protected. I'll veto anything that takes money out of Social Security or Medicare. JIM LEHRER: Governor? GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: The man's practicing fuzzy math again. There's differences. Under Vice President Gore's plan, he's going to grow the federal government in the largest increase since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965, and we're talking about a massive government, folks. We're talking about adding to or increasing 200 new programs-- 200 programs, 20,000 new bureaucrats. Imagine how many IRS agents it's going to take to be able to figure out his targeted tax cut for the middle class that excludes 50 million Americans. There is a huge difference in this campaign. He says he's going to give you tax cuts. 50 million of you won't receive it. He said in his speech he wants to make sure the right people get tax relief. That's not the role of a president to decide right and wrong. Everybody who pays taxes ought to get tax relief. After my plan is in place, the wealthiest American will pay a higher percentage of taxes than they do today, and the poorest of Americans-- six million families, seven million people-- won't pay any tax at all. It is a huge difference. It is the difference between big exploding federal government that wants to think on your behalf and a plan that meets priorities and liberates working people to be able to make decisions on your own. GWEN IFILL: The candidates meet again face to face next Wednesday. GWEN IFILL: Fuzzy math or fuzzy logic? How did the numbers add up? To help us sort through the math, we turn to Carol Cox Wait, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan educational group; and Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. Mr. Reischauer, let's... what are the big differences we saw between these two candidates last night? ROBERT REISCHAUER: Well, I think what we saw was George Bush holding back, trying to look at the big philosophical differences and Al Gore more comfortable with the numbers, the facts, the figures, spewing out a torrent of facts and figures. But I think both candidates really overused figures. There's an adage which says if you torture the numbers long enough, they'll confess to anything. We saw a lot of that last night. GWEN IFILL: Tortured numbers, Carol Cox Wait? CAROL COX WAIT: Oh, indeed. One of the things we keep saying about all of these ten-year aggregate numbers is that we are going to be wrong about them. If we come within half a trillion dollars of the estimates that people make today of what the budget is going to look like over the next ten years, we'll look like a bunch of geniuses for crying out loud. I think the differences between the two candidates, for all the tortured numbers though, did come out last night. It's quite clear that one of them has a conviction that there are a lot of unmet public service needs that best are only can be met by an expansion of the federal government's role in spending. The other has a more limited view of the role of the federal government and wants to have individuals accept more responsibility. And all these numbers reflects those differences. GWEN IFILL: Let's try to walk through as many of the claims we can one by one. Vice President Gore said that Bush's tax-cut plan would benefit only the wealthiest 1%. Does that add up? ROBERT REISCHAUER: Well, what he said is that 43% or almost half of the benefit would go to the top 1%. Over the next ten years, that's an exaggeration. If we look beyond 2010, it's probably a pretty good number, but these proposals are phased in over time, and one that benefits the wealthy disproportionately or exclusively is the elimination of the estate and gift tax. And that really doesn't become effective till the very end of the ten-year period. So, the fraction of the benefit in the next ten years is probably somewhat lower than the 43% mentioned by the Vice President. GWEN IFILL: But the wealthy benefit disproportionately, is that true? CAROL COX WAIT: I think a better way to describe the impact of the tax cut probably is to say that more than half-- about 51% of the benefit goes to filing and it's families that have incomes over $100,000 a year. I think that's a pretty good number. I would say that that can be a policeman and a teacher married to one another and filing jointly in California or New York. Talking about average incomes in this country is kind of like talking about you put your head in the freezer, your feet in the oven and on average you're okay. An average income in one part of the country may not give you a very good living in another. ROBERT REISCHAUER: I think the point here is that in our progressive tax system, the wealthy pay a disproportionate share of the income tax. The top 1% pays about 30% of the income tax and obviously all of the estate and gift tax. So it's hard to cut these two taxes without giving a lot of the benefit to the rich. GWEN IFILL: Let's try to click through a couple more. George W. Bush said that Al Gore's proposals would add 20,000 bureaucrats and expand 200 new programs in the federal government. CAROL COX WAIT: I haven't counted the programs, and I don't know about the benefits, the bureaucrats. It is a very significant expansion in the size and role of the federal government that the Vice President proposes. GWEN IFILL: Do you agree with that? ROBERT REISCHAUER: No, I don't. Both candidates try to use numbers that make their policies look good and the other fellows look terrible. And 20,000 new bureaucrats sounds like a whole heck of a lot, but let's put this in perspective. Between 1990 and 1999, the number of federal bureaucrats declined by 571,000, and Al Gore is saying I'm going to increase this by 4% of the cut we had over the last eight years. And if we did this, if there were 20,000 new bureaucrats, the bureaucrat-to-population ratio would fall steadily throughout the next decade. So, relative to the size of our economy, our nation, this isn't a big number. CAROL COX WAIT: But, Bob, not talking about the number of bureaucrats, when you talk about the first time in the-- gee-- a couple of decades that we've seen major new entitlements proposed in the budget, when you talk about expanding the responsibility of the federal government in providing financing for health care up the income scale for children and into this area of prescription drugs and tax credits for long-term care and what have you, it's a significant expansion of the role and the scope of the federal government and it's a big spending increase. GWEN IFILL: I want to keep moving on this. Al Gore said repeatedly last night that he would put Social Security and Medicare in a lockbox. What does that mean? Is that a rhetorical device or is that something that could really protect Medicare and Social Security, as he leaves that impression certainly? CAROL COX WAIT: We have more hidey holes that we contrive in the federal budget where we can say that we're going to put money that nobody can get their hands on. And none of them mean anything. What means something is whether or not you spend the money and if you do, you don't have it. The thing I like best about the Gore budget is he proposes to use a little bit more of the surplus to retire debt than the Governor does. I think that's a good thing. GWEN IFILL: Lockbox? ROBERT REISCHAUER: Lockbox is a political constraint, not a legal restraint. Barring the fact that we're going to amend our Constitution, there's no way to guarantee that Social Security and Medicare surpluses won't be spent some other way. But it's a very important and very real political constraint. Our political environment has changed dramatically in the last three years, and now people are saying all of Social Security surpluses should be used to pay down debt. Al Gore is saying, we should add Medicare's surpluses to that conviction as well. Will it stick if we have a recession? Probably not. But should we have that as our goal? You bet. GWEN IFILL: Let's talk about the great $4.5 trillion surplus putting aside for a moment whether it exists or not. George W. Bush proposes spending $2 of that to shore up Social Security, a dollar of that on tax cuts roughly and a dollar of that on new programs, important new programs is the way he puts it. Does that add up? CAROL COX WAIT: The balance in the latter two categories is about 60-40, not 50-50. The Governor proposes to cut taxes by $1.3 trillion and increase spending by about 475. Both the Vice President and the Governor were making those numbers seem closer than they were. In the Governor's case, his tax cut is significantly larger. In the Vice President's case, his spending increases are significantly larger. ROBERT REISCHAUER: The important issue here is that both candidates are saying, we're going to pay down or reserve for Social Security the $2.4 trillion we expect that program to generate in the way of surplus. That was unthinkable three or four years ago and represents an advance in policy thinking. Then we're fighting over the scraps that are left over. They might not be as large as we think after this Congress gets out of town because it's going out on just a wave of spending bills. GWEN IFILL: Well, that's my next question, which goes back to the previous one, which is the surplus. Does it really exist in the numbers that they talk about and do... How much do all these proposals rest on the exactitude of these numbers? ROBERT REISCHAUER: Well, let's not lose sleep over this because these are promises made during a campaign. One of these two gentlemen will win. The green eyeshade folks from OMB and the Executive Branch will come in and say, hey boss, this doesn't all fit. We have to massage it here or there. A bill will then be sent up to the Congress. The Congress will take out his axes and chop away the excess limbs. And what will come out the other end will reflect what sort of resources really are available this time next year -- maybe. Maybe we'll have gridlock and we'll continue paying down the debt at even a higher rate. CAROL COX WAIT: I think that we should underline something Bob said: How important it is that we've come to this turn where we say we're going to use the Social Security Trust Fund surpluses to retire debt. That would represent the most restrained fiscal policy I can remember. Having said that, I think the most important question you can ask either candidate is not about the numbers on these pieces of paper so much. You get a sense of direction from those. But if we're wrong, if the surpluses are somewhat smaller than we think they're going to be or if your program costs a little bit more than you think it's going to do, what gives, folks? Are you going to dig into Social Security to help pay for it? Or are you going to trim the program? GWEN IFILL: They spent so much time talking about prescription drugs last night -- we can't ignore that. We saw the exchange where Vice President Gore says yours wouldn't work, you would only cover 5%. I would cover 100%. Which is right? ROBERT REISCHAUER: As usual, neither were right. What Vice President Gore was saying is there is one study that suggests that the short-term program Governor Bush is proposing, which is grants to states to pay benefits to those with incomes over-- under 175% of poverty would only get 5% of the total Medicare population applying and going through the whole rigmarole. In fact somewhere around 30 to 35% of the folks in the country would be eligible for that. Bush also has a long-run program that will probably have participation similar to that of the Vice President's, but he hasn't released any of the real detail of that. Without the detail, you can't make a judgment. GWEN IFILL: A brief response? CAROL COX WAIT: Yeah. Two-thirds of the people in the country have... two-thirds of eligible seniors today have prescription drug coverage. We are talking about one-third of the elderly population that are uncovered today. And the Vice President says we need a new program that's going to take care of everybody, and the Governor says let's take care of the people who don't have coverage now and then figure out through some bipartisan agreement the bigger program, the longer-term reforms to take care of everybody. As Bob says, they're both a little bit wrong on this one, but I think it's important in this Medicare prescription drug debate for everybody to remember that it's one-third of the elderly population we're talking about. Two-thirds have coverage right now. GWEN IFILL: Well, we're going to have to leave the debate there for tonight and let them take it up again next week. Thank you both very much. |