Cheney pegs Kerry taxes at $1.7 trillion

Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that John Kerry’s 73 new spending proposals would require the federal government to raise taxes by $1.7 trillion in the next 10 years.

Although Mr. Kerry already has proposed increasing taxes by $700 billion during that time period, a shortfall of $1 trillion would require the Democratic presidential candidate to enact “a major new tax increase on the workers, entrepreneurs and inventors of this country,” the vice president said in a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“At last count, candidate Kerry had offered 73 new spending proposals. So far, he’s provided details for just 28 of those 73 — and they alone would add $1.7 trillion in new spending by the federal government over 10 years,” he said.

“But here we run up against a basic math problem. Using a generous estimate, the senator’s plan for higher taxes would raise $700 billion. So with $1.7 trillion in extra spending, that leaves a gap of $1 trillion,” Mr. Cheney said. “It takes little imagination to figure out just how he would fill that tax gap — a major new tax increase on the workers, entrepreneurs and inventors of this country.”

Mr. Kerry, campaigning in Sacramento, Calif., fired back, accusing Mr. Cheney of distorting his 20-year Senate record and ridiculing the vice president for keeping a low profile after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“They found Dick Cheney in an undisclosed location and brought him out to attack me,” the Massachusetts senator told students at a jobs-training center. “That seems to be his designated role, not to create jobs, but to attack John Kerry.”

The Kerry campaign, which did not take issue with the charge that the liberal senator voted 350 times to raise taxes, said Mr. Cheney’s charges were misleading because he had selectively told “less than half of the truth.”

“Today, the vice president has cherry-picked a handful of votes that were part of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which John Kerry opposed because they primarily benefited the wealthy and contributed to record deficits,” Mr. Kerry’s campaign said.

“What Cheney didn’t say was that Kerry supported the middle-class alternatives to the Bush tax cuts,” including lowering the child-credit eligibility threshold from $10,500 to $5,000; expanding the 10 percent tax bracket; speeding up marriage-penalty relief; and eliminating the estate tax for small businesses and family farms.

Mr. Kerry has proposed a 10-year, $900 billion health care plan to cover about 27 million of the 44 million uninsured Americans. But he also has pledged to cut the $500 billion federal deficit in half in two years, asserting that raising taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 annually — a bracket that Mr. Bush trimmed in his across-the-board tax cuts — and reinstating some form of inheritance tax will cover additional expenditures.

Mr. Cheney said the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee will not be averse to dramatically increasing taxes, given his track record.

“It turns out John Kerry has voted in the Senate at least 350 times for higher taxes. That averages to one vote for higher taxes every three weeks, for almost two decades. At least the folks in Massachusetts knew he was on the job,” Mr. Cheney said, drawing laughter and applause.

He also added that Mr. Kerry has been “one of the most reliable pro-tax votes in the Senate.”

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