The Kerry campaign this week invited members of the press to join a conference call hosted by a former Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin. During the call, in which we participated, Mr. Rubin said that when President Bush took office he should have implemented a stimulus package aimed at the poor and middle class rather than the one which included the wealthy.

He said that if things had been done his way, then America wouldn’t be in “the horrendous fiscal mess that we’re in now.” He said that our “fiscal mess” is having an adverse effect on the economy because it undermines “business confidence,” adding that America’s broken relationships with the rest of the world have also dampened confidence. He also invoked the old saw about rising deficits leading to rising interest rates.

What’s so odd about that position is that it describes exactly what the president ended up doing during his first year in office. Remember, the president made some compromises with the Democrats in 2001.The tax cuts for the poor were implemented right away (actually, retroactively back to the beginning of the year), while the cuts for the higher brackets were phased in gradually and were not scheduled to be fully implemented until 2007. Everybody got their $300 dollar rebate (to “stimulate” economic demand). The bottom bracket went immediately to 10% from 15%.The top bracket went immediately to 39.1% from 39.6% – a much more modest decrease.

So the Rubin-Kerry plan is not just a theoretical construct. We tried tax-cutsfor-the-poor-but-not-for-the-rich in 2001. What were the results?

Heaven on earth it wasn’t. Economic growth was a modest 3.1%.The establishment survey of payrolls recorded a loss of 1.6 million jobs in the 12 months following the passage of the 2001 tax act, and (remember: there are two surveys) the household one recorded a loss of 490,000 jobs. If Mr. Kerry’s your man, then 2001 was your year: low taxes on the poor; high taxes on the rich; low levels of deficit spending; Fed stimulus (rates dropping from 6% to 2% in one year); relatively low military spending; friendly foreign policy (remember, after September 11, 2001, France and Germany supposedly loved us), comparatively cheap oil. The results were job loss and modest growth.

On the other hand, 2003 to 2004 was an experiment in Bushnomics: tax cuts for everyone, deficit financing, muscular foreign policy, oil price spike. Results: fast economic growth, fast productivity growth, pretty big payroll growth, super-fast entrepreneurship growth. Big deficits in nominal terms coinciding with low interest rates.

The shame of it is that Robert Rubin is not your typical ideologue. His memoirs make clear repeatedly that when ideology conflicts with empirical reality, reality should take precedence. Maybe that only applies in years when there’s not a presidential election scheduled.