COLUMN RIGHT/ JAMES P. PINKERTON : Rhetoric Aside, the Market Doesn’t Lie : If Clinton won’t even cut the super collider, we’re in for nonstop tax-and-spend.

The President was blunt last night: He’ll be “asking more Americans to contribute today so that all of us can prosper tomorrow.”

Only the narrow-minded and the Republican need worry that he repudiated his campaign promises. Clinton is gambling his presidency on the loyal support of his core constituency and the shoulder-shrugging fatalism of Perot voters, who may figure that since all politicians lie, Clinton’s plan is better than nothing.

So how will it play? Clinton will get lots of help from the liberal elite, which is obsessed with the theological point that Reaganism was self-indulgent heresy. The left’s intellectual inquisition is intended to purge the idea that tax cuts and less government promote economic growth.

Clinton will also be supported by establishmentarians whose knee-jerk instinct is to speak flattery to power. But business statespersons who aspire to ambassadorships or state dinner invitations don’t speak for the next generation of job-creating entrepreneurs. Since nobody knows the future, nobody in Washington much worries about future entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, all the corporate apple-polishing in the world won’t get fat cats to put their money where their mouths are. Talk may be cheap, but a personal portfolio is a terrible thing to waste! Take for example, Clinton loyalist Michael Eisner, the CEO of Walt Disney. He cashed in his $197 million in stock options last December, so he’ll pay income taxes at the ’92 rates, even though that will decrease George Bush’s deficit and increase Clinton’s. (Didn’t you pull off a similar deal? No? Then perhaps you can’t afford to be a liberal.)

The globalized financial market, which is too big for Clinton to schmooze, voted “no confidence” after listening to his tax talk Monday night. The blue-chip Dow Jones has fallen 80 points in the last two days, but the broader market was an even bigger loser. The NASDAQ, which lists smaller, faster-growing companies, has lost almost 5% of its value, its worst days since the 1987 crash. Americans--not just the rich, but anyone dependent on a pension fund or in need of a job that only private capital can create--are $100 billion poorer.

They’ll get even poorer after the market absorbs Clinton’s speech to Congress. Clintonomics rests on a counterintuitive theory, that more taxes on investment will increase investment. How can they think that? First, many Democrats have not adjusted their thinking from the wilderness years, when they didn’t have the responsibility of making things work. Still in campaign mode, they have broken the first rule of Washington: They started believing their own press releases about the “unfairness” of “trickle-down economics.”

Second, the Clintonians are trapped. They need money, fast. The real purpose of making the rich scream is to obscure the sound of the middle class getting mugged. The markets know what the rest of the country will soon figure out--that Clinton’s spending cuts are mostly phony. Consider: If Clinton can’t find the will-power to shut down the superconducting super collider--a Reagan-era boondoggle that has overrun its original cost estimate by billions--then what will he cut? Clinton is trying to protect the super collider to try to buy a special Senate election in Texas. Creating jobs at a cost to the taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars each is old thinking. How much of this can we afford?

Clinton doesn’t seem to realize that someone already implemented Clinton’s program--George Bush. In his four years, taxes went up $257 billion on an annualized basis, while spending has increased $333 billion. Like Clinton, Bush cut defense and spent more on infrastructure, education and research and development. If hair of the dog is the answer for the Bush hangover, then Clinton has the right prescription.

If Clintonomics is getting thumbs down, who can the Democrats blame? (Other than themselves, of course.) Easy: the Federal Reserve. Fed-bashing is the last refuge of the economically challenged. Chairman Alan Greenspan testifies before the Senate Banking Committee on Friday. Watch for the Democrats to blast him for not lowering interest rates. Never mind that short-term rates are 3%, the lowest in the world. And if long-term rates are high, that’s because the market expects bigger deficits and more inflation, expectations that senatorial demagoguery will only intensify.

Thus we come to the fundamental question: Will this program work? Clinton says yes, the markets say no. As Groucho Marx used to say: “Who are you gonna believe? Me or your own two eyes?”