George W. Bush: More fiscally conservative then Gore by a nose
"He's the biggest spender in the history of government," responded Bush that evening.
So who's the more fiscally conservative? The term became a modern electoral litmus test in the Clinton years. Ross Perot put debt reduction on the national to-do list in 1992. Clinton's "Greenspan tax" of 1993 made it sexy for the markets, and the Clinton-Gingrich battles of summer produced a balanced budget for the first time most people could remember.
The game of political tag Bush and Gore are playing dates back to the Reagan years, when Ronnie's tax cuts and his Democratic Congress's spending increases combined to balloon the federal deficit and national debt. Gore calls Bush a profligate supply-sider, Bush calls Gore a tax-and-spend liberal. The truth, for both, is somewhere in between.
Short history lesson: Herbert Hoover was a fiscal conservative. He balanced the budget and raised taxes during the Depression. It didn't work. The economy tanked.
FDR was not a fiscal conservative. The New Deal, Social Security, public works projects to stimulate the economy — it worked. World War II was what finally dragged America out of its hole and up to the top of the global economic hierarchy, but of course that was government spending too. And FDR's was the activist template on which the federal government has been drawn ever since.
Technically, Gore and Bush are both fiscal conservatives. Gore is vowing to balance the budget every year for the next 10 years. Over those same 10 years, Bush wants to take $1.3 trillion out of the federal budget and hand it back to taxpayers. Neither of these men qualifies as an FDR. But FDR never had $4.6 trillion in surplus money — fantasy money, to be sure, but counted on by both sides as being within the government's budget — to throw around without going into the red.
The surplus can be roughly divided into halves. One half coming from current (but very temporary) surpluses in Social Security and Medicare. Bush wants to plow that money back into reforms of the programs to prevent future overruns. Gore wants to use the money to pay down the national debt by 2012 (though Social Security money will of course remain in a "lock box") and worry about the overruns later. Bush, for the most part, is worrying about the debt later, planning, more dubiously than Gore (because of that massive Social Security reorganization) to pay it off by 2016. Fiscal conservatism points: Gore 2, for faster and more likely debt repayment; Bush 1, for planning ahead but spending lots in the meantime.
The other half of the surplus is a $2.2 trillion free-for-all, and Gore and Bush's plans for it are almost exactly opposite. Bush wants to give $1.3 trillion back to taxpayers, and spend some $500 billion on new programs. Gore wants to spend $500 billion on tax cuts, and spend the rest (about $800 billion) on new programs (because this is budget talk, what the programs are doesn't matter). Fiscal conservatism points: Bush 2, for shrinking the federal budget (relative to its surplus-fueled growth) more than Gore, and 1 bonus point for pushing across-the-board cuts rather than targeted ones. Gore gets shut out on this one.
What if the surpluses don't materialize, or if in five years, say, they start to reverse themselves (we are still at the mercy of the business cycle here, folks)? Fiscal conservatism points: For prudence, Gore gets 1 point for his larger "rainy day fund" of some $300 billion (which should bring the Bush and Gore plans to about even, but it's really hard to tell). Bush gets half a point here — because once instituted, tax cuts are a lot easier to cancel than entitlement programs. Score on budget: Bush 4.5, Gore 3.
Then there's the mushier, more philosophical question, answered mushily by the rhetoric: Big government or small? On the main issues, Bush's government gets conservative points for partially privatizing Social Security, nudging health care toward the HMOs and spending less federal money on education. Gore gets points for his vows to balance the next 10 budgets and to not add to the government's rolls (though his boast about cutting them was more Cold War's end than anything Gore or Clinton did).
Bush gets a one-point deduction for the intrusiveness of the Religious Right, but Gore gets the same penalty for joining Joe Lieberman's Hollywood crusade in a party that didn't require him to. Gore gets an additional deduction because I still can't figure out whether I'd get a tax cut from him, and transparency counts for something. Gore gets a point for having reinvented government, but loses it again because no one can tell the difference.
Remember that if the surpluses somehow become reality, Bush's and Gore's projected governments will both be larger than the one we have now, although Gore's would be bigger. And remember that the biggest threat to those surpluses besides a recession is Congress, which manages to make everything it sends to the White House a little more expensive than it was before. And conservative Republicans love their pork just as much as liberal Democrats.
Who's the bigger fiscal conservative? On attitude, it's Bush by a mile. On the numbers, it's Bush by a nose — and that's for spending a little less of a lot of money that nobody's even seen yet. They both want to sign trillion-dollar checks on an account that's barely breaking even, and spend it in 10-year plans, when both these guys are clearly one-termers. In a moral, balance-your-checkbook kind of way, they're both incorrigible spenders, because they're trying to win an election.
Tired of the question yet?