Code Breakers.

• Author: Schulz, Max
• Position: Republican Congress favors targeted tax cuts and credits

The GOP has forsaken Reagan's tax message.

More than a decade after Ronald Reagan helicoptered off into the sunset, relinquishing the White House and control of a political revolution that transformed the world, conservatives and Republicans are still tripping over themselves to claim the mantle of the Gipper. GOP aspirants for every office in the land, from dog-catcher to president of the United States, invoke Reagan and claim to be the rightful heirs to his legacy.

The impulse is understandable. More than anyone else--more even than Barry Goldwater or Bill Buckley--Reagan gave shape to what is considered modern American conservatism, broadly defined as opposition to international communism and a belief in a limited government that pretty much leaves people alone. If the Republican Party is the party of anything, it is the party of Reagan.

But for all the reverential invocations of the 41st president, there isn't much fidelity to the core principles he championed, especially when it comes to taxes. It is telling that Reagan is far more warmly remembered for burying the Soviet Union than for his libertarian impulses on taxes. Years before he gained the White House, Reagan articulated his core belief on the subject in his 1964 "A Time for Choosing" speech: "We cannot have [true tax] reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure."

It's no wonder, then, that the conservative movement seems intellectually and politically moribund so soon after rising to electoral power in the mid-1990s. Even as conservatives wrap themselves in the mantle of Reagan, they cannot fully embrace his rejection of tax policy as a means of social engineering, perhaps because it would mean renouncing control too soon after finally grabbing it. But the result is an intellectual and political jumble that underscores the point that conservatives, like the liberals they define themselves against, are more interested in wielding power than in giving it back to individuals.

Take the tax bill the Republican-controlled Congress sent this summer to a skeptical President Clinton, who killed it with relish. Wielding his veto pen, Clinton said, "the bill is too big, too bloated, places too great a burden on America's economy... [and] would force drastic cuts in education, health care, and other vital areas." The 10 percent across-the-board reduction in personal income rates and the attempt to end the...