Says Dukakis Is a ‘Tax-and-Spend’ Gold Medalist : Bush Questions ‘Massachusetts Miracle’

Vice President George Bush, seeking to contrast his economic program with Michael S. Dukakis’ record as governor of Massachusetts, denounced the Democratic presidential nominee on Thursday as “the gold medal winner in the tax-and-spend competition.”

“My opponent’s policies would drive our economy into a decline. They’d bring back inflation and skyrocketing interest rates, falling incomes,” the Republican nominee said. With foreign trade competition growing, he added: “They would knock the foundations out from under the expansion and lose America its place as the economic leader of the world.”

Contrasting Speeches

The vice president’s speech, to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, was in marked contrast to a quietly emotional and oddly philosophical address he delivered 12 hours earlier in which he encouraged wealthy Republican Party contributors to demonstrate greater compassion and to play a larger role in solving the ills of American society.

For Bush, the economic issue offers an opportunity to praise the recovery that has occurred over the last five years after the recession of the Reagan Administration’s first two years in office--but it is also an issue that Dukakis in recent weeks has tried to make a central theme of his campaign by emphasizing what the Democratic campaign has been calling the “middle-class squeeze” that it says is the result of President Reagan’s policies.

Dukakis has argued that a “Swiss cheese economy” has allowed the rich to get richer while the poor have grown poorer throughout the nation, and he has built his campaign around what he has called the “Massachusetts miracle” of economic growth in his state.

‘Budgetary Meltdown’

Rather, Bush said, Massachusetts is “a budgetary Three Mile Island,” a reference to the site of the nuclear power plant accident in 1979, and was facing “a budgetary meltdown.”

“The fact is, the so-called Massachusetts miracle is really the Massachusetts mirage,” Bush said, adding that the state’s budget surplus over two years has become a deficit approaching $500 million to $700 million in fiscal 1989.

But, on Wednesday, Dukakis said the state had completed fiscal 1988 better than expected, ending up with a $67-million surplus, $42 million higher than expected. The budget is nearly $11 billion.

The vice president has sought to focus attention on the economy for several days, increasing the intensity of his criticism throughout the week as he seeks to drive home his message.

Bush argued that, under Dukakis, “taxing and spending has increased more than in any other state,” that the state “has piled up $7.4 billion in debt” and that it has lost 26,000 manufacturing jobs since 1983.

Cites Tax Growth

He asserted that under Dukakis, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1974, defeated for reelection in 1978 and reelected in 1982 and 1986, Massachusetts has increased taxes faster than any other state but one. According to state tax data and U.S. Census Bureau figures, distributed by the Bush campaign, Connecticut led state tax growth with a 68.1% per capita increase from 1983 to 1987, and Massachusetts was second with a 61.5% increase.

“He says he wants to do for America what he did for Massachusetts,” Bush said. “If the federal government had increased taxes at the same rate, the average American family would be paying $2,300 more this year in personal income taxes alone.”

And, the vice president maintained, the increase in state spending in Massachusetts has led all other states. That increase from 1983 to 1987 was 47.8%, the campaign asserted.

“My opponent ranks first in spending increases. Second in tax hikes. If this were the Olympics, his composite score would make him the gold medal winner in the tax-and-spend competition.”

Dukakis, who was touring fire-ravaged Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, was asked about Bush’s comments and replied: “If this nation had 3% unemployment (the rate in Massachusetts) and had 10 years of balanced budgets and had the record that we have, we could be looking forward to a future of strength and optimism and jobs for everybody. My state has more jobs than people to fill them.”

Points to ‘Fiscal Mess’

The Democratic candidate said Bush has been part of an Administration that has left a “fiscal mess (that) I’m going to inherit as the next President of the United States.”

The vice president was clearly in a more reflective mood the night before as he spoke to Republican Party contributors who paid $1,000 each for a dinner of rack of lamb and an evening of political camaraderie.

His message, considerably lower in key than the speech he delivered Thursday morning, was that “prosperity has a purpose, and it’s to pursue what Lincoln called . . . the better angels of our nature.”

“What is the end purpose of economic growth? Is it just to be rich?” the vice president asked, adding: “What a shallow ambition.”