CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / U.S. SENATE : Taxes, Personal Finances, Jobs Are Grist for Attack

In a move to jump-start his flagging campaign, Sen. John Seymour launched a television advertising blitz Monday against Democrat Dianne Feinstein, claiming her economic program would cost California more than 300,000 jobs. The claim, however, was sharply denounced by the authors of two studies identified in the ads as Seymour’s sources.

“This is willful misrepresentation of the study just to get political leverage,” said Avraham Shama, a professor at the University of New Mexico, whose study on defense cuts was cited in the ads.

In the other Senate race, Republican Bruce Herschensohn and Democrat Barbara Boxer engaged in their sharpest clash yet Monday, arguing over income taxes, personal finances and other issues.

Herschensohn, trailing Boxer by a wide margin in voter surveys, went back on an earlier promise not to make an issue of the congresswoman’s history of writing overdrafts on the now-defunct private House bank. Herschensohn, the only major party candidate for the U.S. Senate from California this year who has refused to release his personal income tax returns, said he would release all records of his private checking accounts if Boxer would too.

“She has been irresponsible with money, period. And I think that that is an issue,” Herschensohn told reporters at a Century City news conference.

Boxer, who met with reporters in Burbank, said she was expecting the attack. “He doesn’t want people to focus on (his ideas) so therefore he slashes and burns me,” she said.

Seymour, who had promised to turn up the heat in the race for the two-year Senate seat, began airing ads statewide that focus on Feinstein’s so-called Invest in America economic program. He also began airing a separate ad in Northern California that attacks Feinstein for failing to properly report campaign contributions from her unsuccessful bid for governor in 1990.

In the economic ads, Feinstein is accused of wanting to cut defense spending “almost three times more than the experts,” who are not named in the ads but were identified by spokesman H.D. Palmer as Bush Administration officials. It then goes on to say that separate studies by Shama and a Washington think tank estimate that Feinstein’s cuts would cost California more than 300,000 jobs.

Not true, said Paul Taibl, research director at the Defense Budget Project, the nonpartisan think tank named in the ads. “That is a misrepresentation,” Taibl said. “We haven’t done anything that would show effects on California that deep.”

Taibl said the worst-case scenario studied by the DBP projected 196,667 lost jobs through 1997 if the defense budget were cut by $74 billion. Palmer acknowledged that the study did not identify 300,000 lost jobs, but he said the number was extrapolated from the DBP research by projecting losses if defense spending was cut by $135 billion. Feinstein has said defense cuts should range between $75 billion and $135 billion.

“We believe we are working off a solid base of data,” Palmer said.

But Shama, whose study was also extrapolated to reach the 300,000 figure, criticized the technique as inaccurate and “a sloppy way of doing things.”

Feinstein’s campaign also called the commercial misleading and accused Seymour of distorting her economic plan, which calls for reinvesting defense cuts in domestic programs, such as transportation and schools.

In Burbank, Boxer assailed Herschensohn’s proposal for a simplified flat tax that would levy a uniform 19% rate on all taxpayers, but eliminate most deductions, including, ultimately, the deduction for home mortgages. The Marin County Democrat claimed that it would sharply increase taxes on middle-income Americans.

“During the ‘80s, the rich got richer, and the middle class got squeezed,” Boxer told reporters. “Bruce Herschensohn’s killer tax plan will finish the job. . . . It will kill the middle class.”

Using figures based in part on a study by the labor union-financed Citizens for Tax Justice, Boxer said a family earning $40,000 would find their federal tax bill soar by more than 40%. Households earning $10,800 would see their taxes go up 78%, while those earning $1.3 million would receive a 36% cut in taxes, Boxer said.

As for the 143 overdrafts on the House bank that Boxer wrote, she said: “I’m embarrassed about that. I’ve dealt with it in the primary. People have to look at that along with all the positives that I bring them. And I think they will weigh it, and I think they will understand . . . that there’s more positive than negative.”

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this story.