Take On the Talking Heads
Dollars Bill
by Garry Wills
Feb. 10, 2000 -- Bill Bradley campaigns as if the main job of a president is to dream large dreams. He offers his vision as if merely electing him would make it come true. But if he becomes president, he will have to get any plans he proposes through Congress, and his record while he was in Congress is not reassuring on that score. He was known as a loner in his 18 years as a senator, which may explain his exiguous achievements there.
The one thing that is always referred to as Bradley's great accomplishment was his sponsorship of the tax reform of 1986. But the Congressional Quarterly Inside Politics edition of 1996 said that in the subsequent 10 years "his greatest achievement faded further in memory" with little to place beside it.
Maybe one reason for this slim record is that Bradley was gone so far away so often. Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity notes that Bradley was the champion junketeer of his time, taking more than 160 all-expense-paid trips while in the Senate.
The normal explanation given by members of Congress who go on junkets is that the trips help inform them for legislative purposes. But that cannot be the motive for the 29 trips Bradley took in 1996, after declaring in the fall of 1995 his intent to resign in 1997. In his lame-duck year he went on 29 junkets, more than two a month. This did not prepare him for legislation (which he was not passing). It expanded contacts for his lucrative plunge into the private sector. As Lewis writes in "The Buying of the President 2000": "A month after his retirement from the Senate, he was pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the same Wall Street brokerages whose practices he defended in the Senate."
But what about his tax reform bill? Is that enough to stand for 18 years of public service? Lewis points out that it favored the wealthy. Bradley, for instance, removed the IRA tax break that was used by middle-class citizens for their retirement. This was offered as a revenue enhancer, though no more than $2,500 could be taken as a deduction under it. By contrast, Bradley kept the Keogh Plan, by which the wealthy could shield as much as 30 percent of their income from taxes.
In 1989 Bradley gave an even greater break to the rich when he protected the unlimited deduction for corporate interest that fueled the takeover mania of the time. That allowed corporations to deduct as much as $611 billion in 1994 alone. Bradley said that the loss of revenue for the government would be made up by increases in capital gains by the takeovers, which could then be taxed, producing "a wash" so far as the government treasury was concerned. But the capital gains tax produced only $150 billion revenue in 1994. Some wash.
While the corporate interest deduction was being debated in 1989, The Washington Post said that the takeover artists were flooding Congress with cash. Guess who got more of that cash than any other senator? It was, of course, Bill Bradley.
But Bradley's dearest friends when he was in office were the pharmaceutical companies. He introduced 45 bills meant to reduce taxes on imported chemicals used by them. He won the Merck company a tariff suspension that was worth $1 million annually to them. The "mother of all tax breaks" was the one Bradley defended in 1992, giving drug companies a 100 percent tax write-off for drugs they manufacture in Puerto Rico.
There was nothing illegal, or terribly unusual, in Bradley's services to the fat cats who contributed to him so handsomely. But those services do give his claim to be the enemy of special interests a hollow ring. It is no wonder the only income groups he took away from Al Gore in the New Hampshire returns were those making more than $100,000 a year. He got his nickname Dollar Bill in basketball. But in politics he has always been Dollars Bill.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
