Hey, Big Spender!: Gore and your money.

In Al Gore, Democrats have at last nominated the perfect liberal. Bill Clinton has been an imperfect liberal, because he has always cared more about his own political survival than about the Left's agenda; Gore, in contrast, is far too committed-ideologically and emotionally-to the liberals to abandon them so cavalierly.

Gore is more perfect than Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis-because he can win. He will play the role of the "New Democrat," with soothingly moderate and Clintonesque campaign rhetoric. But the truth is that Gore's record and platform are no less statist than those of a Dukakis or McGovern. In fact, they are more so: By our calculations, Gore wants to spend $1 trillion on new programs over the next decade-on programs, such as universal preschool funding, that a Walter Mondale would never have endorsed. This is what makes Gore the perfect liberal: the unique combination of electability and a deep-rooted ideological commitment to the expansion of government.

In considering Gore's liberal credentials, start with his congressional tenure. The National Taxpayers Union tells us that he was the only senator who has ever-that's right, ever-won the NTU award for the biggest spender on Capitol Hill two years in a row. In 1989 and 1990, he managed to nudge out Ted Kennedy for this honor. Evidently, in those two years there were certain spending bills Gore voted for that were just so fiscally reckless that even Kennedy couldn't, in good conscience, support them. In 11 of 13 years, Gore received the lowest possible grade from NTU on taxpayer issues. How Republicans ever allowed Gore to define himself as a "moderate Democrat" is a mystery.

One of the first votes Gore cast in Congress was in opposition to the Reagan tax cuts of 1981. Twenty years, 35 million jobs, and 10,000 points on the Dow Jones later, he still crows about that vote-reveling in his anti-tax-cut credentials. He savaged his two chief political rivals within the party, Dick Gephardt and Bill Bradley, for having voted for "trickle-down economics." (If Gore had had his way and the Reagan tax cuts had never been enacted, the average middle-income family in America would be paying $6,000 more in taxes every year.)

Bradley made the fatal mistake of trying to run to the left of Gore in the primaries; it would have taken a crowbar to wedge into that narrow territory. Gore quickly established his leftist credentials and crushed the insurrection. Ralph Nader, we suspect, will face the same frustrations.

Everything we know about Gore's role in economic policymaking as vice president is that he has been a consistent voice of unreason in the White House. The famous 1993 BTU tax was Gore's inspiration. Bob Woodward reported that Gore pleaded with Clinton to the very end not to drop this regressive energy-tax proposal. (Incidentally, if all of Gore's energy policies were ever actually implemented, we'd look back on $2-a-gallon as a great bargain.) George Stephanopoulos's book informs us that "Clinton would vent privately that Gore was pushing him to raise taxes too much." Gore swallowed his 1993 disappointment that the largest tax increase in the history of the world wasn't big enough, and cast the tie-breaking vote for it in the Senate. He's as proud of that vote as he is of the vote against Reaganomics.

Even now, with the swelling federal surplus, Gore will support only the most circumscribed tax cuts. On the campaign trail, he has offered up dozens of baffling new tax carve-outs that must have the folks at H&R Block drooling in anticipation of all the added pages of tax-code complexity: tax credits for child care, tax credits for parents who "stay at home to care for their babies," an "after-school tax credit," a long-term-care credit for elderly parents, college-tuition tax credits, "life-long learning tax credits," estate tax credits for family farmers, and business tax credits for "worker training in information technology." Our personal favorites are the "tax credit to consumers for the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars and SUVs," and the tax write-offs for building energy-conserving homes and using solar energy to generate electricity and hot water. Help! Al Gore is trapped in the 1970s and he can't get out.

He is a fiscal throwback to a much worse economic time. Under a Gore presidency, the IRS tax code would start to resemble a piece of bologna after someone has punctured out all the little green olives. The essence of good tax policy is, of course, the exact opposite: low rates, no loopholes, and a broad base. In principle, a tax credit is better than no tax cut at all, but the sum total of all these microscopic, focus-group-tested carve-outs won't reduce many families' overall tax liabilities. When we add up all the 87 tax increases in the latest Clinton-Gore budget proposal, it turns out that the revenue raisers and the Gore tax cuts pretty much cancel each other out. If Gore prevails, there will be a whole lot more lines on your tax form to wrestle with every April, but the size of your check to the IRS would be no smaller.

Gore can't afford grandiose "tax-cut schemes," because he's got spending on his mind. His gold-plated prescription-drug-benefit program for seniors would cost $200 billion. His "Retirement Savings Plus" plan would dole out another $200 billion to low-income workers, who can't afford to save on their own because the Social Security taxes that Gore has consistently voted to raise are so high. Expanding government health coverage to uninsured families would cost $146 billion. His plan to provide free or subsidized preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds costs $115 billion. He also wants a lot more money for regulators at OSHA, the EPA, and the civil-rights and antitrust snoops at the Justice Department; $16 billion for teacher pay raises and teacher recruitment; $200 million for an antismoking initiative; $45 million for curtailing violence at abortion clinics; $2 billion to combat urban sprawl; several million more to keep studying global warming-you get the picture.

The unhappy total comes to about $1.04 trillion of new spending over the next decade, or about $10,000 per household. But, of course, to provide a fair and balanced accounting we need to subtract from this trillion-dollar spending binge the money that Gore would save by shutting down agencies he believes are inefficient and obsolete. The problem is, there aren't any. Zero. Out of the several thousand federal programs in the eight-pound federal budget, Al Gore hasn't yet identified a single one that should be terminated.

For 20 years, Gore has been a reflexive liberal force, first in Congress and then as vice president. He rarely, if ever, defects to the right on budget and tax issues. His multibillion-dollar proposals to nationalize day care, health care, education, crime fighting, transportation policy, and traffic patterns are audacious in their magnitude, yet are brilliantly softened with conservative themes of advancing "accountability," "high standards," "responsibility," "community," "safe neighborhoods," and even "fiscal discipline." Al Gore is, in a word, a fraud. His tactic of saturating statist McGovernite policies in syrupy communitarian rhetoric may be a perfect fit for this new age of feel-good politics-and it might just fly with voters. This makes Al Gore the perfect liberal, and a very dangerous man.