ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 15, 1996 TAG: 9603150060
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
PUBLISHING HEIR Steve Forbes, coming to terms with the inevitable in the Republican presidential primaries, has picked up his marbles - his money, his flat-tax mantra and his message of economic optimism - and gone home. For three reasons, the failure of his campaign is a welcome development.
First, Forbes' initial successes dramatized the distorting effect of big money on American politics. Unlike the presumptive GOP nominee, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, Forbes has never been elected to political office. He has no record of public service. That in itself didn't disqualify him for the presidency. But Forbes never would have gained political prominence or made an appreciable impact on the primaries - winning two of them - were it not for his willingness to reach deep into his pockets and spend huge sums of inherited wealth.
By opting out of the voluntary system of public financing for presidential campaigns, Forbes freed himself from any spending limits. Buying up the airwaves, choking them with negative ads, he diminished Dole's stature in New Hampshire - enough to let Pat Buchanan win - and helped prevent the now-departed Lamar Alexander from surviving in the first tier of candidates. Forbes' exit this week reassures that, while money can buy a lot - indeed, too much - it cannot buy everything.
Second, Forbes' flat-tax proposal was simplistic and misleading. To be sure, the current tax code doesn't encourage savings and investment. It is way too complicated. And it is full of loopholes, one effect of which is to attract armies of lobbyists swarming over Washington. In their search for tax breaks, these special interests corrupt our political culture and distort our capital markets.
But if tax reform is the question, the flat tax is not the answer. There is no reason, for example, why you couldn't simplify what gets taxed while keeping the rates themselves progressive - therefore fair. The scrutiny accorded Forbes' flat-tax idea has helped provoke welcome debate about tax policy. But welcome, too, was the ultimate response to the specifics of his proposal: Exposed long enough to public airing, they shriveled.
Finally, Forbes' candidacy reflected a strain in Republican philosophy that, when it infected policymaking in the 1980s, did demonstrable and continuing damage. As Newsweek's superb economics columnist, Robert Samuelson, observed last January, Forbes' flat-tax proposal resurrected "the worst excesses" of supply-side economics - in particular, the illusion that reduced tax rates "will ignite a burst of economic growth that will wash our hardest choices away."
Forbes on the stump accused other Republicans of pursuing the "root-canal" economics of budget-cutting instead of the optimistic economics of tax-cutting. We're all for optimism. But the sort of outlook compatible with incredible and inherited fortune notwithstanding, most economists do not believe that growth unleashed by reduced taxation would, say, dissolve the need to restrain federal debt growth or to confront the fiscal implications of coming baby-boomer retirements.
Just years before the costs of caring for the elderly are about to explode, Forbes' defeat helpfully repudiates a repeat performance of what George Bush once called "voodoo economics."
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB