FORMER Senator Bob Dole has offered Americans a 15 per cent across-the-board tax cut over three years in a bid to seize the initiative from President Clinton.
The Republican contender for the presidency has timed his tax package to attract maximum attention in the week leading up to his party's convention in San Diego, which will endorse his candidature.
Mr Dole unveiled his long- awaited economic programme while President Clinton and his aides attacked the proposed tax cuts as a U-turn on the part of the contender, and as likely to increase the budget deficit which Republicans have pledged to abolish by 2003.
The tax package will cost $548 billion over three years in lost revenues, but Mr Dole insists that it can be paid for in increased growth and cuts in government spending.
This is criticised in some quarters as the kind of "supply side" or "voodoo" economics which he ridiculed when it was put forward by Mr George Bush in 1988. Then both were contenders for the Republican nomination.
The Dole tax package also includes the halving of the top capital gains tax rate to 14 per cent and a $500-a-child tax credit.
Mr Dole told an enthusiastic audience in Chicago that the package would mean a cut of over 50 per cent in taxes for a lower middle class family. Among those who applauded were his former rival, multi-millionaire Steve Forbes, who had campaigned on a 17 per cent "flat tax" platform. In one of his best performances what has been a much-criticised lacklustre campaign, Mr Dole attacked the Clinton presidency for slowing economic growth and squeezing the middle classes by tax increases.
Mr Dole pledged to continue tax reform after he was elected by reducing the Internal Revenue Service and forbidding any future income tax increases.
While economists will query the growth figures claimed for the Dole package, it will greatly help his campaign by sharply differentiating his approach from that of President Clinton.
Hitherto, the President has frustrated many of the Republican aims by adopting them as his own in areas such as ending the deficit, reforming the welfare system, and crime.