Letter: Country would have benefited under Gore

Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006 | 8:20 a.m.

In his Feb. 20 letter, F. Jay Harrell writes that "... it does not require a crystal ball to know that we would have higher taxes, higher deficits, and less national security if Gore and/or Kerry had been elected." Perhaps Mr. Harrell would be better off with a crystal ball.

Regarding Gore, it's true that if he had won, we would have had higher taxes than we currently have under the Bush administration. However, it's precisely because of Bush's tax cuts that it would be impossible for Gore to have had higher deficits.

Under Clinton-Gore, the deficit was disappearing and would've been gone within a decade or so. Many reply that this is because President Bush has had to fight a war. My response is that, regarding national security, the 9/11 attacks would never had happened.

Instead of blowing off meeting with Richard Clarke and other experts trying to ring the warning bell, instead of just skimming through daily National Intelligence Briefing materials, instead of taking a monthlong vacation when warnings of an attack were intensifying, Mr. Gore would've listened to what his counter-terrorism and intel experts were telling him and would've mobilized the full resources of the federal government to stop the attacks before they even happened.

No "war on terrorism," no mushrooming deficits, and, with the GOP having retained control of Congress in the 2000 elections, I highly doubt taxes would have increased over what they were in January 2001.

And at least the Clinton-Gore taxes were being used to do something useful: Pay off the deficit, which had ballooned to record levels under - yeah, you guessed it - the GOP administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Gregory Grant, Las Vegas