By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Believe me, I'm in favor of a tax cut... a big one... the bigger the better.

But if the Republican Party is banking on a fight with President Clinton over the size of its proposed tax cut to carry the day in the 2000 elections, I fear for the future.

Most people favor a tax cut. I don't need anybody's poll to tell me that. Taxes eat us alive as we try to take care of the necessities and have a little left over to enjoy the fruits of an economy that can crank out some really interesting and fun quality-of-life enhancers.

But most people also, wrongly in my opinion, favor a small tax cut, a gradual tax cut.

The reason people favor the wrong approach to tax cutting is that they have bought the media hype, fed by both parties in Congress and the president, that there is a budget surplus. They also buy the argument of one particular party that we should “save Social Security” and accomplish some other wish-list items before we, the taxpayers, get to cash in on these supposed good times.

First, there is no budget surplus. There is a projected surplus based on current spending levels. If Congress changes hands in 2000, there will never be a surplus, and there's no absolute guarantee that Republicans won't go crazy and spend it all either. So we're arguing about how to spend a fantom windfall that may or may not ever exist.

Second, the president once again is winning the rhetorical war by making a statement that is undeniably correct... if you accept the premise that it's based on. He argues for “saving Social Security” rather than passing a tax cut, as if the two were mutually exclusive, and as if the long-term goal should be “saving” the program, i.e. putting enough money into it to keep it going just as it is.

We need to do away with Social Security, but even if we decide to keep this obsolete program as it is, we can fund it and still begin taking realistic steps toward whittling taxes down to a long-term, sustainable, reasonable level that doesn't force everyone with a five-figure or less income to struggle his or her entire life just to render unto Caesar that which Caesar has no right to require.

If we reduce taxes, the economy is stimulated so that the revenue generated by the lower tax rates increases. It may not increase enough to completely wipe out the effects of the cut, but the final result is certainly not a simple subtraction problem.

And if there is indeed a reduction in revenue from the tax cut, that's even better because at that point maybe the politicians won't occupy all their waking hours looking for ways to “spend” the surplus.

And if you think having a Republican Congress will keep that from happening, think again. Republicans have to get reelected just as Democrats do, and part of getting reelected is to keep the money flowing to the district.

Now I've spent most of this column arguing for a big tax cut, and I said at the top that Republicans shouldn't put too many eggs in that basket. Here's what I would propose, if anybody asked me.

Go ahead and cut back on the tax cut. You're not going to get a big one past the president anyway, and after he vetoes it and you come back with a smaller one that he'll accept, he'll use the situation to crow about having saved Social Security from those crazy Republicans and their “risky” tax cut plan.

Get the tax cut in place, and then get serious about a balanced budget amendment. Push harder than you've every pushed for it. Explain through the press, and through advertising if you can't get the press's attention, that the only way to protect the American people from the natural effects of political back-scratching (you scratch mine, I'll scratch yours) is to make deficit spending illegal.

And make Social Security reform — not “saving” business as usual — the number one issue in 2000. Retired people who are living on Social Security have been robbed, pure and simple, and today's work force is being robbed too. That case would be so easy to make that even GOP speech writers should be able to figure it out.

Another suggestion: Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan group that spends all its time studying the federal budget to find the fat, has identified a bunch of useless, obsolete programs and says that if they were cut, we would save $1.2 trillion over five years. Check it out at www.cagw.org, or call 1-800-BE ANGRY.

Republicans should thoroughly study CAGW's suggestions — they don't have to accept them all, but identify a few hundred billion worth that they can reasonably stand behind — and introduce bill after bill after bill getting rid of those programs. Then when the president vetoes all of them, there will be plenty of issues to run on in 2000.

There's plenty more that can be done if the thinkers in the GOP will broaden their horizons a little. If that doesn't happen, we'll see a repeat of `98.

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