Brent Bozell in a column at the oh-so-authoritative and moderate TownHall.com
complains of the national media's attempts to portray a raging liberal like Dean as a centrist.
Let's review a smidgen of what the networks and news magazines have desperately tried to explain away or paper over in the last few weeks. Dean is agnostic on the closing of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian torture house, and has to be poked and pushed into acknowledging that Saddam was a bit of a bad egg. Dean obediently followed the leftist judicial activists of Vermont's Supreme Court into providing gay "civil unions," which has led to a Republican electoral surge. Dean, according to the Cato Institute, led one of the nation's highest taxing and spending states. Dean backs partial-birth abortion, and thinks the whole issue of skull-sucking infanticide is "phony."This consists of a lie, a lie, a claim that Dean respects the rule of law and (gasp!) follows court rulings, a claim from the Cato Institute (which, by the way, is not too happy about Bush's own record as President), and the fact that Dean thinks that politicians shouldn't practice medicine (he himself gave up his practice, so why shouldn't the conservatives?).
I'd do more to rip this apart, but I don't have to.
Why?
Because Sebastian at
Sadly, No! has done the job already:
Bozell doesn't bore us with a reference, but Cato's most comprehensive study on the topic are its Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors.
Why not start with 2000, which covered both Governors Dean and Bush? Where did Dean rank? His overall fiscal policy grade was 53, placing him 34th. (ahead of 7 Republican governors.) On spending, Dean was ranked 10th (for frugality,) and Bush 7th. For "Average Annual Change in Real per Capita Tax Revenue through 1998" Dean was listed fourth under the heading "Best Revenue Restraint." For "Average Annual Change in Tax Revenue per $1,000 Personal Income through 1998" Dean was (again) ranked fourth for "Best Revenue Restraint." Dean does feature as a "top 10 tax hikers" Bozell might counter. Indeed. But what was his "Average Annual Recommended Tax Changes as a Percentage of Prior Year's Spending?" 1.88%. (In fourth place, he is beaten by 2 Republican governors.) Cato's comments on Dean?
In some ways he is. In his first three terms as governor (Vermont still has two year terms), state spending rose by less than personal income growth. In 1999 he sought and won support for an across-the-board income tax cut to make the state more economically competitive.
Curious what Cato had to say about Bush?
He is a politician who seems to always want to keep everyone happy. His last budget climbed to growth rates not seen since Ann Richards: his last budget grew by close to 10 percent, among the largest increases in the nation in 1999. He shoveled a record $2.1 billion of new money into the Texas schools and then declared himself "the education governor." In 1993 Bush crafted a convoluted tax-restructuring scheme that proved to be hugely unpopular with small businesspeople who would have seen their tax bills rise. The plan blew up, Bush was politically wounded, and finally he strategically retreated and signed a $1 billion property tax cut instead.
Amazingly, in its 2002 report the Cato institute simply repeated much of what it had said in 2000, but came to a very different conclusion. Dean went from being in many ways a fiscal conservative to exhibiting "so-called fiscal conservatism."
But what does Cato's data show? For the period 1991-2000, real per capita spending increased by 32% in Vermont (30th) -- compared to 47% in Texas (11th.)Smell that?
That's the smell of the facts.
Posted by Matt at August 6, 2003 12:56 PM
http://deandefense.org/archives/000587.html
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