If Gore does not understand why, he evidently missed the 1990s. Writing in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru notes that in 1989, a high priority of the new Republican president, George Bush, was a cut in the capital gains tax. He could not get it. In 1997, a Democratic president signed a capital gains tax cut. Between 1989 and 1997, more than 25 million additional Americans became owners of stocks.
Democracies make difficult decisions under the lash of necessity.
Sixty years ago this month, the British, having consigned Churchill to the wilderness for years, brought him to power only because German forces were rampant across the English Channel. No comparable exigency compelled Bush to put Social Security reform at the center of the campaign. But, then, considerations of equity are a kind of exigency. Personal retirement accounts would be sound social policy even if Social Security's condition were not actuarially ominous. Two years ago two Democratic senators singularly informed about Social Security, New York's Pat Moynihan and Nebraska's Bob Kerrey, proposed that employees be allowed to put approximately one-sixth their payroll taxes into personal savings accounts.