Wednesday, October 25, 2000

By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

For those who are seriously considering the issues in this year's presidential election, and who haven't yet made up their minds, two questions probably figure prominently in the decision-making process.

1. Is Al Gore exaggerating when he says that most of George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts would got to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans?

2. Is George Bush telling the truth when he says that our military is in dire straits due to the Clinton Administration's neglect and over-commitment?

I may be overly optimistic on that second one. Maybe nobody cares about that. We tend to be pretty complacent about the military until somebody slips past our forward observers with a few hundred bombers and practically obliterates our navy.

Yes, I know that was almost 60 years ago. I just chose it because it's the most obvious example. But there have been plenty of instances since then when our best and brightest have lost their lives in conflicts for no other reason than that our armed forces were unprepared.

I wish we could erect a memorial with all the names of the men and women who have died but who might have lived if they had had the training, equipment and strength of numbers that they needed when we sent them into harm's way.

I'm hoping that during this election most people accept the fact that we need a strong military, and they're just trying to decide which candidate will be the best at making sure we have one.

In the last debate, Gore set a trap for himself when he forcefully stated, as he has in the past, that our military is ready for any problem that comes up, then boasted that he proposes to increase military spending by $100 billion while Bush proposes only $45 billion.

If everything's so hunky dory, why do we need to increase military spending by $100 billion, Mr. Gore?

Of course our people in uniform can carry out their missions. That's not the question.

The question is whether they can do it in a timely manner, and how many of them will die or be wounded because they are under-supported and over-deployed.

Since the question came up early in the campaign, I have read dozens if not hundreds of news reports from major outlets like the Washington Post, as well as from associations of military retirees and other organizations close to the armed forces.

The evidence is overwhelming that morale in the military is almost as low as it was following Vietnam.

Experienced officers and noncoms are leaving in droves, not because they're lured by the private sector as Gore proposes, but because they're fed up with how they're being treated.

The number of deployments coupled with the reduction in the number of people naturally has resulted in troops being in the field for longer and longer periods, and the increased use of reserve troops to shore up our numbers has sent thousands of reservists packing as well.

We have people in danger spots who have had very little training. There have been well-publicized plane crashes and other accidents that have resulted in loss of life due, at least in part, to this lack of training.

And if a major conflict were to erupt today, yes, we would get there, and yes, we would prevail. But we would get there weeks later than we should, and we would have to fight harder to catch up as a result.

The Clinton/Gore Administration has done this on purpose. The Cold War is over, we were told, and we can take those "peace dividends" (funny how you never hear that phrase from Gore these days) and use them to buy votes with social programs.

Oh, and there was supposed to also be a middle class tax cut. Never happened.

Now Gore is proposing more "targeted" tax cuts, which we can safely assume will also never happen, and I'm willing to bet that $100 billion he has pledged to spend rearming the military will also never happen.

Which brings us to Bush's proposal for across-the-board tax cuts.

I hate to say it, but Gore's not exaggerating on this one. The richest Americans will get the biggest cuts, because the richest Americans pay most of the taxes.

But think about what a tax cut is for. Yes, it's nice to have a little more jingle in one's pockets, but the main purpose of a tax cut is to get more money flowing into the economy. And if you leave out the people who are paying the most, then you're not going to have much new money flowing into the economy.

Gore did exaggerate a great deal, however, when he pointed all around the room and said that any one rich person will get more than everyone in the room combined. That was more of the theatrical nonsense that we have come to expect from Gore.

One more thing. If you give everyone an equal tax cut that is, the same percentage cut although rich people will get a larger break in dollars, the percentage of the total taxes that they pay will go up. Bush actually proposes to increase the burden of the wealthy from 62 percent of the taxes to 64 percent.

One other benefit of tax cuts is that they are morally right. They wouldn't be if our tax burden were more reasonable. But we are paying half of our incomes in taxes.

Whether you're rich or whether you're poor, that's too much.

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