Elections: tax cut versus lockbox: did the voters grasp the tradeoff in 2000?…

The central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign was how to allocate the projected federal budget surplus. George W. Bush proposed returning much of this revenue via an across-the-board reduction in federal income taxes. In contrast, Al Gore argued that most of the surplus should be put aside in a lockbox in order to bolster the Social Security and Medicare programs. This article finds that …