Gore Hammers Bush Tax Cut

Al Gore criticized his Republican rival's tax cut plan Thursday as "economic snake oil" that would imperil prosperity, take money from social services and perhaps put the government back deep in debt.

Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, noted that Congress refused a day earlier to act on a budget plan similar to Republican George W. Bush's proposal for across-the-board tax cuts.

"Now, if it is so risky that even the group that Newt Gingrich ushered into the United States Congress will not vote for it, you know it is risky indeed," Gore said.

The vice president was speaking to ACORN, an organization that lobbies for investment in low-income neighborhoods and for improved credit for residents of such areas. The group endorsed him.

The vice president reached back into the Republican primary campaign and revived criticism of Bush by former candidate John McCain of Arizona. McCain accused the Texas governor of proposing to spend too much of the projected federal budget surplus on tax relief instead of Social Security and Medicare.

"I am telling you, he should have been taking notes during John McCain's campaign," Gore said. "He is so committed to this economic snake oil that ... he even dismissed John McCain's campaign and said that he had learned nothing from it and had no intention of taking any advice from the McCain group."

Bush says his tax cuts would not touch portions of the surplus set aside for Social Security and Medicare.

But Gore painted a dark picture of a country reverting to the deficits of Bush's father's administration. "He could put us way into the hole," he said. "Back to the Bush-Quayle years."

A day earlier, Gore touted himself as a friend of unions, families and working class Americans at a suburban Pittsburgh high school.

At a standing-room only rally at Moon Area High School, Gore emphasized his family-man credentials, mentioning his infant grandson and the fact that he and Tipper Gore will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary in May.

He also reminded the crowd of his status as a Vietnam veteran and presented himself as a friend of the working class who will strive to pass universal health care for children and strengthen unions.

He received a huge cheer from the crowd of working-class parents and teen-agers when he spoke of his plans to raise the minimum wage by $1 an hour.

"If we went back to the old Bush-Quayle approach and built up the debt again, we would set this whole country back for a long ways," Gore said. "You felt the effects of what happened then."

Specifically, he criticized his Republican rival for planning a $483 billion, five-year tax cut and for proposing to privatize parts of Medicare and Social Security.

"If we went down that road, we'd end up with a two-tiered system: One for the wealthy and one for the rest," said Gore, who clinched the Democratic nomination for president Tuesdanight.

Earlier Wednesday, in Philadelphia, Gore promised to boost federal education spending by half, "but keep control at the local level." He also said better parenting is key to reducing school violence.

It was in this city that Gore laid out his education and gun control proposals before several hundred cheering students at the Dobbins/Randolph Area Vocational Technical High School.

Among other proposals, he called for $10,000 signing bonuses to recruit mid-career teachers from other professions, additional special education funding, mandatory testing of new teachers and renovated school buildings.

Gore said school violence is going down, "but the horrific examples of violence are getting worse." He said parents need to spend more time with their children.

"A lot of parents are stressed out, exhausted, working so hard that when they get home at night they hardly have time to do anything except turn on the television," Gore said.

He also repeated his call for mandatory trigger locks on guns and also proposed more school counselors and psychologists, metal detectors for schools that want them and reduced class sizes. He also chastised Hollywood for the violence in its movies, films and music.

"We have got to do something to get more voluntary self-restraint in the entertainment media of this country because of the excessive incidents of violence being showered onto the heads of our young people," Gore said.