If White House glory-hogging-speechwriter-turned-Washington Post-columnist Michael Gerson wants to use his new platform to buff the tarnished image of his former colleagues, he’s going to have to do a lot better than this. In today’s column, a paean to Karl Rove, he writes:

“First, Rove argues that Republicans win as activist reformers, in the tradition of Lincoln, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. "We were founded as a reformist party," he said in our conversation this week, "not to be against something, but to help the little guy get ahead." The models he cites are 401(k)s and the mortgage interest deduction -- government policies that encouraged individual wealth and ownership. Then Rove spent several minutes describing, with wonkish delight, the momentum and virtues of health savings accounts, a Bush-era innovation allowing individuals to save tax-free for routine medical expenses.”

But it's worth noting, with wonkish delight, that the items cited—401(k)s, the mortgage interest deduction, and Health Savings Accounts--are transparently not vehicles to “help the little guy get ahead.” They’re vehicles to help those who are already doing well do somewhat better, and to help those doing fantastically well do much better. And in the case of 401(k)s and health savings accounts, they’re vehicles designed to push more risk off the balance sheets of corporations and onto the balance sheets of the little guys.

Taking them somewhat out of order. The home mortgage deduction, is explicitly *not* meant for the little guy. If you don’t itemize your deductions, it’s meaningless. At best, it’s an upper-middle-class entitlement. As Roger Lowenstein noted in this definitive piece in the New York Times magazine in March 2006:

More than 70 percent of tax filers don't get any benefit from the deduction at all. O.K., many of them are renters. But even among homeowners, only about half claim the deduction. And for the 37 million individuals and couples who do, the rewards, at least on average, are surprisingly modest — just under $2,000 per return. (Figure it like this: the median home, as computed by the Bureau of the Census in 2003, is valued at $140,000. If you finance 80 percent of it with a 6 percent mortgage, your interest bill is $6,720 a year. A taxpayer in the 25 percent bracket would save one quarter, or $1,680.) . . .

And the rewards are greatly skewed in favor of the moderately to the conspicuously rich. On a million-dollar mortgage (the people with those really need help, right?), the tax benefit is worth approximately $21,000 a year. And according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a little over half of the benefit is taken by just 12 percent of taxpayers, or those with incomes of $100,000 or more.

Next, lets take 401(k)s. They have been promoted—and embraced—by corporate America as replacements for the defined-benefit pension plans, which offered guaranteed retirement income to working-class employees. 401(k)s can be a great vehicle to build wealth—if you have lots of disposable income to stash in them, and if you make sound investment decisions. But most people lack the capacity to do so. The delightful wonks at  Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research found that in 2004 the median 401(k) balance for workers aged 55-64 was $60,000--a sum that would produce less than $400 a month in annuity income.

Health Savings Accounts are in the same realm as the 401(k)s. If you have the disposable income to stow away several thousand dollars a year—after you’ve already stowed away several thousand dollars in your 401(k) and paid all your other bills--and if you're in a high tax bracket, they're a great deal. If you can’t, they're not.

In their days at the White House, I doubt Gerson or Rove ever really looked at this statistic from the White House's Website: in 2005, the  median household income was $46,326.