Clinton Pulling The Wool Over Our E

The press has spent a lot of time grousing about Bob Dole’s tax plan. But what about Bill Clinton’s? Talk about risky: Clinton wants to play Robin Hood.

He says he’ll hand out $300 tax credits for children under the age of 13; tax deductions of up to $10,000 or a $1,500 tax credit for college tuition; the expansion of individual retirement accounts (IRAs) to set aside money for education, health care and purchases of first homes; and some other little “targeted tax cuts” to buy a vote here and there.

The educational giveaways account for the vast majority of the relief, figured now at $94 billion over five years.

But the subsidies fit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s classic definition of the dole: They are a narcotic, designed to get folks hooked on government “help.”

College costs have been outpacing inflation for nearly two decades. According to the Digest of Educational Statistics, charges at public colleges jumped 23 percent (after adjusting for inflation) in the decade between 1984-85 and 1994-95, and they skyrocketed 39 percent at private institutions. They rose by more than twice the rate of inflation last year.

The reason is simple: Colleges have adopted the drug dealer’s approach to survival. They offer services at a discount, knowing people will get hooked, and then they jack up prices.

Federal aid and loan guarantees provide the lure. When students pour onto campus, drawn in by the promise of financial support, colleges start spending. They hire faculty members and other staffers. They build dormitories, classrooms, laboratories, gymnasiums, athletic fields, eating houses, auditoriums - you name it.

To serve a clientele that is less exclusive than the old crowd, some places dumb down curricula. This accounts not only for the disappearance of required courses in language and Western civilization but also for the proliferation of fluff, such as crisis counseling for kids edgy about meeting their roommates.

Bruce Carnes, a former undersecretary of education, complained nearly a decade ago in Policy Review that colleges and universities are seeking “to maximize revenue, not profit, and therefore they have no incentive to keep costs down.” This new philosophy rose in the late 1970s when the federal government got into college aid in a big way - and offered the promise of bottomless pockets for clever administrators.

Uncle Sam thus set off a stampede of youths headed for school and sent tuition rocketing beyond the average American’s reach. Between 1980 and 1992, public-college expenses jumped to 15.8 percent of median family income - a one-third jump. And the price of a private university education leaped to 39.7 percent of a family’s pretax income.

The Clinton tax plan will encourage even more students to head for the groves of academe, but let’s put the offer in perspective: Clinton’s proposal will hand out a maximum of only $1,500. But one year of private college costs nearly $13,000 on the average; the typical public college charges $3,000.

The result: The president’s plan won’t make education more affordable. Rather, it will send tuition costs soaring again - and put loan recipients in hoc for years.

But there’s more: Bill Clinton is the only president in American history whose promises come with expiration dates.

His promise of 100,000 additional law enforcement officers expires in the year 2000. He says he’ll renege on welfare reform next summer. And all the nice elements of this year’s tax package will vanish, like Cinderella’s carriage, in 2000 - just two years after they become available.

Think about this: Clinton has sworn to protect Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. But at the same time, he has proposed to balance the federal budget by weaseling out of the largest tuition program in American history - along with most of his other recent promises - during a presidential election year.

The moment you consider the larger implications of this plan, not to mention its timing, it becomes obvious this administration has managed to combine the worst of all worlds. Clinton has created high expectations by promising to make college affordable - without alerting Americans to the fine print: His offer expires after just two years. If angry voters insist on keeping the perk, the deficit - and tempers - will soar.

The Clinton/Gore team talks soothingly of “opportunity, responsibility and community,” but its tax cut violates each of those principles.

The plan yanks college costs further from average families’ reach, shirks the government’s responsibility to treat people’s money with care and sunders our sense of community by inciting another fistfight over entitlements.

“Risky”? “Scheme”?

These guys - the authors of ClintonCare and now of ClintonAid - wrote the book.

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