Gore to Spell Out Economic Plans

Vice President Al Gore plans to release a detailed economic agenda today that seeks to increase home ownership, boost family incomes, cut the pay gap between men and women and reduce poverty levels to near historic lows.

Gore will unveil a 191-page budget blueprint that vows to eliminate the national debt by 2012 and to set aside $300 billion in a rainy-day fund in case the widely projected budget surpluses fall short, Gore senior campaign officials said.

The key to achieving those goals, Gore believes, is his debt reduction plan. He will argue that significant debt reduction will produce lower interest rates for consumers when they borrow money to buy a house or an automobile. President Clinton also has been making this argument for months at fund-raisers and in a speech to the nation’s governors earlier this year.

Gore’s plan features his previously announced targeted tax cuts for middle-class families, various tax credits for expenses such as college tuitions and new retirement savings plans; an increase in the minimum wage; and stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination laws as a way to reduce the pay gap between men and women.

Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, will lay out his sweeping agenda in a speech this morning at Cleveland State University. He also will promise to submit to Congress a balanced budget plan every year he is president.

Gore’s emphasis on details--to a striking degree for a presidential candidate--is part of his strategy to pressure Republican rival George W. Bush to also release the specifics of his agenda.

Gore’s unrelenting criticism of Bush for not offering a detailed plan to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare may well have been a driving force behind the Texas governor’s release on Tuesday of just such a proposal. Gore immediately denounced Bush’s plan as inadequate.

A Hedge of $300 Billion

A key feature of Gore’s economic agenda is his proposal to set aside $300 billion as a hedge, in case the budget surplus projections over the next 10 years fall short. If there is no such shortfall, the $300-billion set-aside would be devoted to further reducing the debt.

The whopping budget surplus projections are being made by the Congressional Budget Office and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

The CBO, assuming faster growth rates, projects a 10-year surplus of $4.4 trillion, or about $300 billion more than the OMB’s projection.

A Bush spokesman dismissed Gore’s $300-billion set-aside as “a political campaign gimmick.”

“The facts are: Al Gore busts the budget. He spends the surplus on bigger government. And he complicates the tax code by forcing people to hire lawyers and accountants to determine if they are the lucky ones to get targeted tax relief,” said Dan Bartlett.

In his ambitious economic plan, Gore seeks to double the number of families with $50,000 or more in savings by 2010 by giving families matching tax credits and tax deductions for new 401(k)-style retirement savings accounts. These accounts provide tax incentives for savings, based on a family’s income. Today only one-third of families have assets at that level.

The vice president also will promise to reduce income taxes on the average family by providing $480 billion in targeted cuts aimed at helping families with child care, health care, college costs and long-term care as well as savings. As a result, the income tax burden on the average family will fall by 2002 to its lowest level in 50 years, according to Gore’s blueprint. (According to the Gore campaign, an average family of four has an annual income of $47,000.)

The Gore document foresees raising family incomes by one-third over the next decade--even after inflation and taxes--as a result of paying down the debt and investing in training, technology and research, and supporting “common-sense” deregulation.

The blueprint further claims that Gore’s plan will enable seven in 10 families to own a home by 2004, thanks to lower interest rates as well as strengthening of the low-income housing tax credit and the Community Reinvestment Act. Homeownership now stands at about 67% of families.

College Tuition Would Be Tax-Deductible

To increase college enrollment and graduation, Gore would make most college tuition tax-deductible, give tax credits for college savings and expand programs to help disadvantaged students enter college. Such efforts, Gore’s plan predicts, would raise the college attendance rate from 67% of high school seniors to 75% by 2010. He also wants to raise from 37% to 50% the number of college-age people who obtain a degree.

In seeking to help the nation’s poor, Gore’s goal is to reduce the poverty level by 2004 to fewer than one in 10 Americans--a rate unseen since 1978, when the poverty rate for families was 9.1%. Ron Klain, a senior Gore advisor, said that prediction presumed a $1-an-hour increase in the minimum wage, expansion of tax credits for the working poor, a crackdown on deadbeat dads and a boost in Social Security for elderly women living alone.

Gore’s plan seeks to cut in half over the next decade the gender gap in pay by increasing enforcement of antidiscrimination laws; providing training aimed at moving more women into high-tech, high-skill jobs; and providing loans and assistance to women who want to start small businesses. Women now earn 73 cents to every dollar earned by men.

Plans for an ‘Innovation Agenda’

To create 10 million high-quality, high-tech, high-skill jobs over the next decade, Gore proposes the creation of an “Innovation Agenda” that would expand education and training programs to record levels, open foreign markets and pursue policies to help high-tech and e-commerce.

Gore’s two other goals are familiar campaign promises: to pay off the national debt by 2012 and to put into “lock boxes” the surpluses from Social Security and Medicare. Gore would dedicate such funds solely to extending the lives of the two retirement programs.

“What Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are doing here defies conventional wisdom: They are putting out a detailed economic plan, full of specifics,” said one campaign official.

The vice president offered a sneak preview of his economic speech on Tuesday.

Campaigning in Columbus, Ohio, Gore told employees of Resource Marketing Inc., an Internet marketing firm:

“Tomorrow, I’ll be laying out very specific economic goals for our nation and the specific policies to achieve them. I’ll be offering not just an economic plan, but a detailed budget plan,” Gore said.

“You have a right to know that everything I’m proposing is fully paid for within a balanced budget that pays down the debt every year and secures the future of Social Security and Medicare.”

Accompanied to the event by former astronaut and ex-Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), Gore told the firm’s workers that he would harness the power of the new economy, spread the wealth and close the so-called digital divide.

The key to that strategy, Gore said, is improving the nation’s public education system. He vowed to make that “the No. 1 priority for the 21st century.”

Also on Tuesday, the national environmental group Friends of the Earth endorsed Gore, calling him “the best hope for the nation’s environment.”

The organization’s president, Brent Blackwelder, said: “There is a Grand Canyon of environmental differences between Al Gore and George W. Bush.”