In a front page article in tomorrow's edition of the Washington Post, Mike Allen analyzes the costs of the proposals made during President Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The results are striking.

You might have heard Bush attacking Kerry for proposing $2 trillion in new initiatives during any number of his stump speeches. Allen finds that not only might this claim be exaggrated, but Bush's proposals would actually add more to the long-term debt of the United States. Allen writes:

The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.

A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan [emphasis added].

Allen proceeds to list the sheer costs of Bush's proposals, each of which more bloated than the last. He writes of Bush's pledge to make his tax cuts permanent, which "would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years, according to administration estimates" [emphasis added]. He writes of the President's plan to privatize social security which "could cost the government $2 trillion over the coming decade." He continues:

And Bush's agenda has many costs the administration has not publicly estimated. For instance, Bush said in his speech that he would continue to try to stabilize Iraq and wage war on terrorism. The war in Iraq alone costs $4 billion a month, but the president's annual budget does not reflect that cost.

Bush's platform highlights the challenge for both presidential candidates in trying to lure voters with attractive government initiatives at a time of mounting budget deficits. This year's federal budget deficit will reach a record $422 billion, and the government is expected to accumulate $2.3 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported last week.

Although not on the scale of Ross Perot in 1992, it looks like deficit hawks are not happy about the deterioration of America's vast 10-year surplus--which could have wiped out the nation's entire national debt--that has occurred under the President's watch.

Some fiscal conservatives who are dismayed by the return of budget deficits found little to cheer in the president's convention speech. Stephen Moore, president of the conservative Club for Growth, said that Bush's Social Security plan was money well spent by saving the system in the long run, but he added that Bush "has banked his presidency on the idea that people don't really care about the deficit, and he may be right."

"He's a big-government Republican, and there's no longer even the pretense that he's for smaller government," Moore said.

I'm not certain why Kerry is not hitting this hard. One of his main achievements in 19 years in the Senate has been fighting successfully to curtail government deficits in the 1980s and 90s.

It would be tough to switch messages at this point, but I think there are a lot of Americans--main street conservatives, Perot moderates--who are extremely concerned about deficits right now. I think it would behoove the Democratic nominee to speak to these people's concerns because they are a large bloc who could realistically swing into the blue column come November. With the support of these swing voters--and in particular the millions who voted twice for Ross Perot in the 1990s--Kerry would be able to win quite comfortably, in my estimation.