WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's top advisers assembled at the White House yesterday to tout Mr. Clinton's new tax-cutting proposal, bash Republicans and portray Democrats
as the party that cares most about the middle class.
Meanwhile, Republicans who ran successfully Nov. 8 on a tax-slashing platform they called "Contract with America" sarcastically welcomed Mr. Clinton to the tax-cut debate and dubbed his more modest plans "Contract Lite."
Trying to regain command of the national dialogue, Mr. Clinton's team cautioned Americans to take a close look at the president's plan, unveiled in a nationally televised speech Thursday night.
"I want to ask every parent in America to sit down at the kitchen table this weekend," said Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. "Look through the president's proposal, think about your future, think of the complexities of the times, and think how you fit in, and see exactly what it does to you as a family."
But that will not be an easy task -- as even White House budget officials conceded -- because the exact amounts of the tax cuts and when they will kick in have not been decided.
"We'll have more on that Monday," said Gene Sperling, a White House economic adviser. "But some of these numbers we won't know until we get the budget done."
In his speech, Mr. Clinton played up two figures: the first, a $10,000 maximum deduction for tuition to college or trade school; the second, a $500 tax cut per child age 12 or younger.
But the president also said that those cuts would be "phased" in during the next six years. In other words, it would not be until 2000 -- four years after Mr. Clinton's current term expires -- that the full tax deductions would be available to taxpayers.
In an interview last night, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that, for 1996, the deduction for higher education would be $2,000. She said the child tax credit would probably be $200.
"That's the slowest it would be," she said. "We'd like to move them up quickly after that, but we are committed to pay-as-you-go year by year, so we have to be careful."
Mr. Clinton's economic advisers remain convinced that if deficit spending is uncontrolled, the economy -- and all Americans -- will suffer. For that reason, the fine print in the president's proposal reveals that there might be less to it than first meets the eye -- and less than in the various Republican plans that have been advanced.
Among the caveats about Mr. Clinton's plan are:
* It doesn't begin until Jan. 1, 1996.
* The phase-in aspect of the tax break for children means that for parents to get the full break, their children would now have to be 6 or younger.
* The college deduction covers tuition and fees, but not books, dorm costs, room and board or other costs associated with sending young people to college.
* All the tax breaks, including the expansion of Individual Retirement Accounts, are capped -- that is, limited based on family income. For the tuition tax break, it begins to diminish at an adjusted family income of $100,000. Those making $120,000 a year are ineligible.
For the child deduction, the tax break is reduced starting at a family income of $60,000 and ends by the time family income reaches $75,000.
This means that the administration's plans for tax relief would exclude significant portions of the middle class, especially those who live on the West Coast or in other regions with a high cost of living.
White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta and Treasury Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen said yesterday that this was done to ensure that the tax cuts go to the true middle class and not to the affluent. They also stressed repeatedly that they could not be more generous without blowing budget deficits through the roof.
"The president wants to make things fair without cooking those books," Mr. Bentsen said.
Asked why the child tax deduction ends at age 13, Mr. Bentsen said, "I'll be very candid: We did what we could afford."
Republicans countered that the Democrats' stinginess with tax breaks shows that they still don't get the basic message of the midterm elections: Americans want to pay significantly lower taxes, and they trust themselves, more than the government, to spend that money to help their families.
"We don't want taxation to become a matter of class warfare," Haley Barbour, the Republican national chairman, said yesterday. "We want to cut taxes much, much, much more broadly than he."
All day, Republicans made the same point. Some treated Mr. Clinton's proposals as if they were a nice first step. Others suggested that they'd take his ideas -- such as making college tuition deductible -- and simply add them to the GOP's own ambitious tax-cutting plans.
"The president had some . . . good suggestions," said Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, the next majority leader, who made the "Contract Lite" quip. "To the extent that the president had proposals that were different than those found in the contract, I ,, think they would be welcome additions."
This struck administration officials who are worried deeply about the budget deficit as ominous. But Republican leaders said that Mr. Clinton and his loyalists should have thought of that sooner.
"We're not going to get in a bidding war with anybody on taxes," Mr. Barbour said. "If the Democrats wanted to get into a bidding war over taxes, they should have done it before Nov. 8."