Clinton to Revive Retirement and Tax Cut Plans

WASHINGTON —  In his final opportunity to shape the nation’s spending and tax policy, President Clinton is preparing to revive a controversial plan to motivate Americans to put aside money for retirement and to propose new tax breaks for some of the 44 million people who lack health insurance, senior White House officials said Sunday.

A top aide also said that Clinton’s new budget will include $10 million for research into how to prevent guns from being fired by anyone but their owners.

The disclosures followed a long-established White House pattern of leaking budget plans as trial balloons as Clinton’s State of the Union message approaches.

White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said the National Institute of Justice would help fund research and development of so-called smart gun technology, now being developed by several manufacturers.

Podesta said the Clinton administration hoped to work with the gun makers on developing the technology, which would use fingerprints, radio waves or other ways to ensure that a weapon would fire only when used by its owner.

“We’ve had some discussions with them about this, about how we can improve the technology so that, again, only a lawful owner can use the gun,” Podesta said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And if that’s true, what you can prevent is a police officer being disarmed by a felon and having the gun used against the police officer. But I think, almost most importantly, it’ll prevent children from being able to get access to guns and use them.”

Podesta also urged Congress to pass gun control legislation. Following the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, House and Senate negotiators failed to agree on a juvenile crime bill that contained gun control measures, including background checks of purchasers at gun shows.

Officials said the core of the tax cut plan, which Clinton intends to propose next month in the last budget of his administration, will be subsidized retirement accounts, expanded efforts to help the uninsured and some type of new financial assistance for poor families.

Podesta said the tax cut Clinton will outline in his Jan. 27 address will be roughly the same size as the $322 billion in tax initiatives over 10 years that the president recommended to Congress last winter.

That means that the final year of Clinton’s term could reprise the running feud between the White House and congressional Republicans, who have a far different vision of how best to use the nation’s growing budget surpluses to help American families.

House and Senate GOP leaders last summer pushed through a package that would have provided $792 billion in tax cuts over the coming decade by eliminating the so-called marriage penalty and estate taxes and reducing levies on capital gains. But Republicans’ hopes for broad tax relief died in a presidential veto. In the end, Congress and the White House agreed in November to extend several relatively minor tax provisions that had been set to expire.

The White House has contended that the country will be better off using the luxury of unprecedented surpluses to pay off some of the national debt and to prop up the nation’s major entitlement programs, which will become increasingly strained in the early decades of the new century as the U.S. population ages.