Vice President Cheney went on the attack against Sen. John F. Kerry on economic issues today, portraying the Democratic presidential candidate as a chronic tax hiker whose pledges to maintain tax cuts for the middle class cannot be trusted.
In response, the Massachusetts senator's campaign pointed to the Bush administration's record of higher deficits, job losses and growing debt, charging that "like Bush, Cheney has no credibility to lecture anyone on the economy."
The skirmishing came as Kerry campaigned in California before undergoing a planned surgery, and the Bush-Cheney organization released a new radio ad in which a speaker who says he is a Boston-area law enforcement officer criticizes Kerry's record on taxes.
"John Kerry likes to raise taxes," says the speaker, Jay Moccia. "So much so he's voted for higher taxes 350 times. I'm a working guy with six kids. The last thing I need is another Kerry tax increase."
The Kerry campaign said the senator would undergo outpatient surgery Wednesday in Boston to repair a tendon that he tore in his right shoulder while on the campaign trail in Iowa in January.
Kerry, 60, was standing in his bus talking to reporters when the bus "stopped short" and the senator twisted his arm in trying to maintain his balance, a campaign statement said. It said Kerry would likely be under general anesthesia while the hour-long operation was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Kerry will wear a sling for up to a week, and will resume his public schedule this weekend," the statement said.
Addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., Cheney defended the administration's policies and painted an optimistic picture of the nation's economy. "The tax relief that we passed is working," he said to applause from the audience.
Cheney attacked Kerry's campaign pledge to repeal Bush's tax cuts for Americans making more than $200,000 a year while keeping in place reductions for those who earn less than that.
"He's given the usual assurances that, in those first 100 days he's planning, only the wealthiest Americans can expect higher taxes," Cheney told the chamber. "But voters are entitled to measure that campaign promise against Senator Kerry's long record in support of higher taxes for virtually every income group."
Cheney said, "All in all, this is the record of a senator who will speak out against higher taxes when it suits the political moment but is one of the most reliable pro-tax votes in the United States Senate. Add it all up, and it turns out John Kerry has voted in the Senate at least 350 times for higher taxes."
The vice president went on to denounce Kerry's proposal last week for a tax cut on businesses as part of a plan to create 10 million new jobs in his first four years in office. Kerry said the corporate tax cuts would be offset by the elimination of tax breaks that encourage companies to move jobs overseas.
Cheney said of Kerry's plan, "In fact, it involves a massive tax increase for American companies that do business abroad." He charged that it "would simply give foreign competitors a leg up over American companies and result in the destruction of jobs here in the United States."
In the November election, the choice on economic policy "is between a senator who would raise taxes and a president who has cut them," Cheney said. "It is the difference between a senator who makes endless promises of new federal spending and a president who insists on spending discipline in Washington, D.C."
In a statement issued today in response to Cheney, the Kerry campaign noted that since the Bush administration took office, it has presided over the loss of nearly 3 million jobs and the transformation of a $127 billion budget surplus in fiscal 2001 into a record deficit projected at $521 billion this year.
"Once again, Dick Cheney is telling less than half of the truth," the statement said. "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. What Cheney didn't say was that Kerry supported the middle class alternatives to the Bush tax cuts."
Contrary to Cheney's claims, the Kerry campaign said, Kerry actually voted to broaden eligibility for a child tax credit, speed up marriage penalty relief, expand a 10 percent tax bracket for working families and cut taxes for small businesses.
On the charge that Kerry has "voted for higher taxes" more than 350 times during his 19-year Senate career, a political fact-checking group contends that the Bush-Cheney campaign's list is "padded" with votes to leave taxes unchanged and even to reduce them.
According to the Annenberg Political Fact Check, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, "Kerry has cast votes to increase taxes, and he's clearly on record favoring raising taxes on persons making over $200,000 a year." However, "It's simply untrue that Kerry voted for tax increases 350 times," said the group, which bills itself as nonpartisan.
The Bush list, the fact-checking group says on its Web site, "is padded with scores of votes Kerry cast against tax decreases (which would leave taxes unchanged, not higher), votes to reduce the size of proposed tax cuts (which would leave taxes lower, though not as much lower as proposed), and 'votes for watered-down, Democrat 'tax cut' substitutes' (which often proposed to distribute the benefits of tax cuts farther down the income scale than Republican proposals). Thus the Bush campaign counts some votes for tax cuts as votes for 'higher taxes.' "
