THE VAPORWARE PRESIDENT; CLINTON'S GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS PLAN, LIKE PAST EFFORTS, LACKS SUBSTANCE.

Byline: Gary Galles

IN advance of the Kyoto greenhouse emissions conference that opened Monday, President Clinton announced his proposal to deal with the problem. He would roll back U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by 2012, which would be roughly 30 percent below currently forecast emission levels for that year. He would set up a program of tax incentives and R & D, create an international emissions trading system, give credits for early emission reductions, and require developing countries to also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, details about how those proposals would be accomplished are glaringly absent.

That same lack of nuts-and-bolts details also has characterized his approach to other major policy issues, such as his proposals during the 1996 and 1997 budget negotiations, and his earlier health care plan.

One result is that Bill Clinton may go into the history books as the Vaporware President. That term is borrowed from Microsoft competitors' name for the software giant's policy of advance announcements of products it plans to develop, with virtually no further details about them - dubbed vaporware, for the lack of substance involved.

Consider President Clinton's greenhouse gas plan more carefully.

Despite the fact that respected forecasters estimate that the necessary changes would be dramatic, it offers no estimates of how much it would increase energy prices (for fear it would sound too much like his failed earlier carbon tax proposal).

The WEFA Group estimates that to achieve the target reductions in greenhouse gases would require increasing gasoline prices by 65 cents per gallon, and more than doubling natural gas and electricity prices by the year 2020, with $3.3 trillion in lost GDP over 20 years (about $600 per year per American). Gene Sperling, head of Clinton's National Economic Policy Council, responded by scoffing at forecasting models, and claiming that ``if this country mobilizes in the (unspecified) right way, we can get there without having a significant price increase.''

Clinton's plan relies heavily on a complex international pollution-trading scheme, to begin in 10 years. But it fails to discuss how such a plan would be implemented, monitored and enforced.

It is supposedly global in scope. But no details on the emission reductions to be expected from major developing countries are given beyond Clinton's ambiguous promise that ``the United States will not assume binding obligations unless key developing nations meaningfully participate in this effort.''

It will increase efficiency through a $5 billion plan of tax incentives and R & D subsidies (a decision made just the night before the announcement). But it actually asks key industries to spend the next nine months developing reduction plans, lured with the promise of being ``rewarded appropriately'' in an unspecified manner.

In other words, at this point it is just vaporware.

President sets trend

Clinton's budget negotiation strategies have fallen in the same category. In 1996, Republicans forced him to agree to balance the budget over seven years. But he vetoed the detailed Republican budget, and, rather than providing his own budget, he came up only with a two-page list of vaguely worded ``principles that must be addressed'' in any compromise (principles which were clearly inconsistent with eliminating the budget deficit, because they would have kept virtually everyone from substantial budgetary pain).

Even when the administration did finally submit a compromise budget, it was not its own, but rather based on Sen. Thomas A. Daschle's, D-S.D., proposal.

The same vaporware game was played over President Clinton's proposed fiscal 1997 budget. Rather than the multiple volume detailed budget proposals normally submitted to Congress, his administration provided only a short, bare-bones outline, which did not even provide enough information for the Congressional Budget Office to score the deficit it would generate.

President Clinton's earlier health insurance proposal was also full of vaporware.

It was built around ``universal access'' and ``strict cost controls,'' but Americans were given hardly a clue about how these largely inconsistent goals would be achieved.

Exactly what quantity and quality of services was there to be universal access to? How was universal coverage, which would raise the demand for medical care and thus the cost, to be reconciled with strict cost controls, which would undermine the incentives to provide that care? Either universal access was going to be less than universal, but we weren't told how, or costs would rise, but we weren't told who would really foot the bill. It claimed multibillion-dollar savings in reduced fraud and mismanagement, although exactly how was never spelled out.

If the government knew how to do this, why were the problems so severe in the first place? And why are current government medical programs still rife with abuse after more than a quarter-century to get them right? Fully covered patients, with nothing at stake, would not monitor billing abuses, and no one showed how government bureaucrats watching computer screens hundreds of miles away would suddenly be transformed into informed and efficient medical resource managers.

These repeated refusals to provide specifics about the policies President Clinton advocates fail to provide the detailed information necessary to judge how his programs would fare or falter in the real world.

This stealth approach to policy formation makes it particularly important to remember that, like private sector salesmen, politicians strive to present their wares as attractively as possible.

Given the desire to make the most effective possible sales pitch for his policies, what can we conclude from the fact that President Clinton's pitch for his major policies typically consists of vaporware?

Policies indefensible

There seem to be two possibilities, both providing reasons for voter suspicion that those policies are in fact logically or empirically indefensible.

One possibility is that there may be no details to give - President Clinton may well not have plans that fit his stated principles and real-world constraints. If so, he knows too little to deliver on his policy promises.

Then all we have to rely on is blind faith that he will somehow in the future know precisely what to do and do it right (or delegate that decision to an unnamed future bureaucrat who meets the same standard).

The second possibility is that President Clinton may know the details of what he would do in these areas, but is simply unwilling to provide them (hiding behind such excuses as the policies are too complicated to spell out to voters or that omitting essential details is necessary to preserve negotiating room). If so, the reality of what he would do also will fall far short of his rhetoric. If it is necessary to conceal such details to make the best case possible for what he wants to do, those details must be adverse. If the Clinton administration knew the details of its initiatives, and those details made a more persuasive sales pitch for their position (and only they know what their position really is), it would be in their interest not just to reveal them, but to trumpet them at every opportunity.

If campaign rhetoric is unmatched by specific program details, there is little reason for confidence that such proposals will make good law.

Without knowing those details, no reliable way exists to determine whether a policy will actually accomplish what it does so easily in front of TV cameras. In the private sector, you would never spend your own money based on such vague promises of an unseen product (even with Microsoft products, purchasers typically wait until the product is actually released); you would be foolhardy to act any differently when the decade's best political salesman is marketing his claims to future history books.