Dole Calls for Tax Reform, Blasts Clinton for Rate Hike

Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole called Saturday for a simpler, fairer and less-intrusive tax system as he accused President Clinton of presiding over the biggest tax increase in history.

Dole used the Republicans’ weekly radio address to rip Clinton’s record on taxes, including 1993 legislation that raised taxes on gasoline and boosted income taxes on the richest Americans.

“In a little under a month, Americans will mark the third anniversary of the $265-billion Clinton tax increase,” Dole said. “This increase--the largest tax increase in world history--was passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress in August of 1993.”

Dole said he had helped head the fight for tax reduction, and he called for fewer rules and regulations in the complex tax system.

“I believe it’s high time for a fairer, flatter and simpler system,” Dole said. “I believe it’s time for the 1040 form to go the way of the Berlin Wall. I believe you should be able to file your tax return on a postcard, or electronically, without paper at all.”

He said that last year alone, American taxpayers spent 1.8 billion hours filling out tax forms and that the Internal Revenue Service has grown to a $10-billion agency with 100,000 employees. Tax collectors, he said, “have grown more and more highhanded. Today, there are more investigators working for the IRS than for the [Drug Enforcement Administration].”

But the Clinton campaign responded that Dole’s 35-year congressional career shows he helped build “an increasingly complicated and unfair system” and voted repeatedly to raise taxes.

The president’s campaign offered up a seven-page sampler of quotes from prominent Republicans attacking Dole for repeatedly raising taxes.

Examples:

* Jack Kemp, 1988: “Bob Dole never met a tax he didn’t hike.” Kemp called the 1982 tax increase Dole supported “the largest tax increase ever passed in American history.”

* Newt Gingrich, 1984: He called Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state.”