MANCHESTER, N.H. -- You can always tell when a Republican is peddling snake oil about taxes, and George W. Bush dropped the classic hint here last week during the Great Non-Debate.
It's the old Goldilocks line about the porridge. Bush, through his smug smile, said some have called his tax cut ideas too much; some have called them too little; so, he grinned, this must mean they are ''just right.''
Does not. The truth is that the president-in-waiting has committed such an irresponsible political and substantive act, one so dangerous to a prosperous economy, that the yelps of left, right, and center are all squarely on target. His fellow GOP candidates have yet to lay a serious glove on him, but in terms of the general election the Democrats are already certain that Bush has painted a huge bull's-eye on his back. That's no mean feat and merits analysis.
From the left and center - everybody from Dick Gephardt and Al Gore to John McCain - the Bush scheme is a $1.1 trillion clunker that is almost half again as huge over 10 years as the egg Congress laid this year that President Clinton gleefully vetoed. It is also almost double the tax turkey (15 percent across the board) that Bob Dole halfheartedly pushed to an uninterested general electorate in 1996.
It more than consumes the surplus outside the Social Security system that is anticipated over the next decade but is based on the assumption not just of uninterrupted economic growth but also of spending cuts that even this Congress has been unwilling to make.
Indeed, just to make his ideas work on paper, Bush aides had to inflate Congressional Budget Office economic projections, the first appearance of that dangerous temptress from the irresponsible 1980s - Rosy Scenario. The fact is that pie-in-the-sky tax schemes that bust the budget are most likely to produce the sharply higher interest rates that can in turn create the recessions they claim to prevent.
But it gets worse. If you spend the entire anticipated surplus on tax cuts, that means in the case of Bush that he hasn't paid for the multiple add-ons he's promised to the military. And if you make no provision for additional investment in Medicare, just how is this vital program supposed to survive the baby boom generation's retirement if not via cutbacks in services and benefits? For the poor, the working poor, the near-poor, and serious chunks of the middle-class, the handful or less of dollars a week in tax cuts would disappear in an avalanche of slashes in basic domestic programs.
The other hint that a Republican is selling snake oil comes when he stresses, as Bush has since unveiling his proposal last week, percentage reductions in income tax rates. The biggest percentage reduction in rates would be for low-income families by dropping the rate from 15 to 10 percent for people in the lowest bracket, who would also benefit from a doubling of the refundable $500-per-child tax credit.
But income taxes are only a tiny fact of life for people with low incomes, who are primarily hit via Social Security levies. More than a third of the actual Bush dollars would, of course, go to the top 1 percent, with more than $300,000 in income. The top 10 percent, starting at $90,000, would get 60 percent of the bucks; the bottom 60 percent of America, from $38,000 and change on down, would get but 10 percent.
If he were truly a compassionate conservative, Bush wouldn't drop the top rate 6 points to 33 percent, he wouldn't end inheritance taxes on the richest estates, and he wouldn't make the child tax credit open to people with incomes up to $200,000. If he hadn't done all that, Bush also wouldn't have busted the budget. That's why, if I were John McCain, I'd call the guy what he is, a pork-barrel conservative.
But our friends further on the right also have things to say about taxes, even if Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes did a lousy job of it here the other night. What Bush has proposed would be an effective end to the flat-rate income tax long advocated by Ronald Reagan's most committed supply-side disciples.
With the Bush proposal, the hated IRS would remain, the tax code would get a few hundred more pages (if the special interests don't get Congress to add even more, as happened under Reagan in 1981), and complexity via regulations would achieve a permanent advantage over simplicity.
Down the stretch to the primary, Forbes will never have a better chance than now to make the true believer's case with the tub-thumping aid of the Manchester Union-Leader. But it's endgame time.
The best opportunity, though, is from the center. Al Gore is already on the case. The question is what John McCain will do on Gore's right. He didn't do much the other night. But he does have a case for tax relief targeted more on working families, respectful of the necessity of budget responsibility to keep prosperity alive, and relentlessly opposed to special-interest goodies that clutter tax bills the way cash corrupts campaigns.
But McCain has to make that case, and vigorously. A stirring biography will get people's attention, but it won't get their votes, especially on a kitchen table issue like taxes.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
