Turn on your fog lights!
Presidential debates foster a thick vapor of plans and promises, critiques and countercharges, which means political visibility in Boston will be near zero come Tuesday night.
Groping one's way through the mist that obscures the campaign trail is difficult indeed, which leads to the oft-repeated assertion that there's no real difference between the candidates.
But this year in particular, that's a notion as false as it is facile. The 2000 election is the first time in almost three decades that the government truly has had surplus cash to spend - a possible $2.17 trillion over the next decade - and the choices Al Gore and George W. Bush have made cast the differences between them in stark relief.
Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, wants to cut taxes to the tune of about $1.549 trillion over that period. Gore, the Democratic vice president, wants to spend an almost identical amount - $1.533 trillion - on social programs, primarily Medicare and health care.
''They are mirror opposite images of each other,'' asserts Carol Cox Wait, whose bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget produced the hard numbers from soft campaign rhetoric.
''The vice president proposes to increase spending by almost the same amount as the governor proposes to cut taxes.''
And make no mistake, those are big numbers.
''Gore's is much the biggest spending increase since LBJ,'' Wait contends. Bush's tax cut, meanwhile, is about triple the $548 billion proposal GOP nominee Bob Dole offered in 1996.
Defining the differences
Wait arrived at her numbers by sorting new spending from true tax cuts, discarding vague promises of savings and oft-proposed but never realized loophole-closing, attaching realistic price tags to programs, and assigning interest rates where relevant.
According to CRFB's scoring, Bush would return 71 percent of the surplus to taxpayers, while Gore would devote an equal percentage to new programs - although he proposes his own modest tax cut, too.
All told, CRFB estimates that Gore's total new spending plus tax cuts would cost $1.8 trillion, while Bush's tax cuts plus new spending would cost $2.1 trillion.
The Concord Coalition, the nonprofit budgetary group started by Warren Rudman and the late Paul Tsongas after the two had left the US Senate, looks at the fiscal figures a little differently, accepting at face value the candidates' own reckoning about program costs.
But Concord's accounting shows the same trend. Both candidates have pledged to protect the Social Security surplus of $2.4 trillion; that's what all the palaver about putting Social Security funds in a ''lockbox'' means.
Against the $2.17 trillion remaining (by Congressional Budget Office estimates), Bush has $1.3 trillion in tax cuts, $312 billion in interest charges, and $279 billion in new spending, for a total of $1.9 trillion over 10 years.
Gore uses $480 billion for tax cuts, pays $253 billion in interest, and allocates $705 billion for new spending, for a total of $1.44 trillion over a decade.
So even by that reckoning, Bush favors a tax cut more than twice as large as Gore's, while Gore offers 21/2 times more spending than Bush. That fact alone should be useful to those jaded voters who have come to think the candidates are (too) similar on the issues.
A question of viewpoint
That difference is rooted in competing philosophies.
To Bush, the projected federal budget surplus is taxpayer not government money, and in a time of prosperity, the taxpayers have primary claim.
Despite opposition rhetoric about Bush's tax cut targeting its benefits to the rich, the income tax rate reductions he has proposed would basically send the money back proportionate to the way it was collected, says Wait.
So would the wealthy receive most of the benefit? Yes, but that's because they pay most of the income tax. According to CBO estimates, in 1999, the top 20 percent of taxpayers, a category that starts at $101,200 for a family of four, paid 79 percent of the income tax burden.
''The real question is why Bush chose that particular policy,'' says William Gale, a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, who notes that Bush could have proposed cutting payroll taxes, which are a bigger burden than the income tax for many moderate-income filers.
The answer there is clear: As a conservative, Bush defines a proportional tax cut, rather than a redistributive one, as fair.
Gore's view is very different.
He would use a surplus collected disproportionately from those earning $100,000 and more to pay for benefits aimed principally at families earning $75,000 and less. Thus, conceptually, Gore's plan can be seen as an attempt to redistribute income through new spending and targeted tax cuts.
Nor do the differences end there. Bush's no-strings-attached tax-cut plan lets recipients spend their money as they wish.
In contrast, Gore's tax reductions are best viewed as tax-expenditure spending designed to promote specific goals, from expanding college education, home ownership, and private savings to energy-efficient homes and gas-efficient cars.
''Bush utilizes rate reductions, which are generally considered by tax experts to be more efficient in terms of providing tax relief,'' says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition. ''Gore uses targeted tax cuts, which are quite similar to spending increases, as a way of instituting small entitlement programs through the tax code.''
If Bush's tax cut is so large that it has raised concerns about whether it will create new deficits or overheat the economy, the size of some of Gore's proposed entitlements has also raised concerns.
For example, though Gore prices his Retirement Savings Plus plan - generous matching grants to encourage the accumulation of nest eggs - at $200 billion over a decade, Wait warns that that cost could grow to as high as $750 billion. The prescription drug benefit he would add to Medicare is another $517 billion, CRFB believes (Gore would offset that with $152 billion in premiums).
So, depending on whose math one accepts, in those two strokes, Gore might well add between $700 billion and $1.2 trillion in entitlement spending over a decade.
Caveat voter
As campaigns go, this one is both heartening and not. The good news: For both candidates to agree to take the Social Security surplus off the table is an act of unexpected responsibility.
''From a historical perspective, both candidates are being extremely prudent in a fiscal sense,'' says Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995, and now president of the Urban Institute.
On that score, Reischauer gives a slight edge to Gore, who has also pledged to take the Medicare trust fund off-budget and who includes a rainy-day fund in his plans.
Others, however, say Bush's tax cut would prove easier to reverse in the future than Gore's new entitlements.
''If we need money, I am sure the politicians would raise taxes,'' says Bixby. ''Whereas, in Gore's case, if you create new entitlements and the surplus doesn't come in as projected, they are not going to roll back those entitlements.''
Imaginary money?
Bixby's concern echoes a warning others have issued about the whole exercise of campaign budgeting: Bush and Gore are busily promising tax cuts and new spending with a surplus that may never materialize in cold hard cash.
If one credits the two campaigns' cost accounts as accurate (a risky assumption, since campaign costs are usually low-balled), then Bush exhausts about 88 percent of the projected surplus between taxes and new spending, Gore about 66 percent.
But is it realistic to expect a surplus of that magnitude?
Probably not, Gale and Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics and law at the University of California at Berkeley, argue in a new Brookings Institution policy paper. The $2.17 trillion CBO surplus assumes discretionary spending will grow only at the rate of inflation.
That sounds reasonable at first, but what it means is a real-dollar freeze of federal spending. At a time when the nation's population grows by about 1 percent annually, on a per capita basis, that effectively means a 10 percent per person spending cut over a decade, Gale says.
Few think Congress will accede to that, particularly in a time of plenty.
And what happens if you assume government discretionary spending grows at the same rate as the Gross Domestic Product (which means the federal government stays the same relative size)? Presto! The so-called surplus is $864 billion smaller.
Put the Medicare trust fund and government retirement fund surpluses in the same ''lockbox'' as Social Security - and why not, since they, too, are surpluses against future entitlements? - and the surplus drops by another $802 billion, to about $500 billion, the two economists write.
That doesn't necessarily spell disaster, but it does speak to the clash between campaign-trail rhetoric and fiscal reality.
So how to interpret the competing tax and spending plans? Reischauer, one of Washington's most astute observers of budgetary politics, offers this cue.
''What it tells you is that we are likely to pay down the national debt because of the Social Security surplus,'' he says. ''What we do with the remainder will, under one plan, largely take the form of reductions in the tax burden, and under the other, will largely take the form of increased spending in an effort to achieve certain social objectives.''
Now that formulation may not be as exact as voters might wish; what it offers is not satisfying specifics but rather general direction. But even at that level of abstraction, voters who are looking can see a very real difference between Bush and Gore.
