John Kerry, in aiming to whack away at the federal deficit, is also whacking away at campaign promises, and that’s commendable. More or less. There are problems, such as the fact he should never have made the promises in the first place and is not wholly abandoning them now.
It’s not exactly a minor point, either, that nothing in the revamped policy ideas he has outlined would have more than a feather’s weight of impact on the deficit — but let’s get back to the promises.
In the primaries, the Democrats vied with each other over who could spend the most federal money. That works politically when the voters you are appealing to are mostly liberal and believe deeply in the efficacy of social programs.
In a general election, Democratic candidates tend to move to the right to court more moderate voters, and in Mr. Kerry’s case, there was another source of motivation, namely TV ads from the Bush camp. The ads looked at his promises, added up their costs and showed how you would have to tax the nation into something close to poverty to pay for them.
Mr. Kerry could have responded by doing what candidates so often do: pretend the programs won’t cost all that much, or that the money could be had by locating waste.
To his credit, he did recognize their cost and said you cannot have deficit reduction and those programs, too. But why would he have promised federally financed preschool education for every child? Education is a state responsibility. The states cannot afford to pay? Neither can the federal government.
The Kerry idea of paying for the college educations of national service “volunteers” is a misuse of the word “volunteer,” which, in the context of charity, means working for nothing. If you want to expand the federal bureaucracy with paid workers, be honest about it, and don’t pretend there is a dearth of programs to help finance the education of students whose families lack the means to foot the bill.
Mr. Kerry is not now ditching these proposals. He is scaling them back until he is satisfied they can be fully implemented.
Meanwhile, he is saying not a word about what he would do to thwart the budget-gobbling giants known as Social Security and Medicare.
He also would like to tax the rich more, which could be as economically dangerous as deficits and doesn’t get him the revenues needed. Deficits might decline if the economy continues improving. His plan doesn’t come close to getting us there.
Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers.
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