When Vice President Al Gore promised to retire the national debt by 2013 and even to run surpluses in the case of a recession, I assumed that he was merely trying to score a political point by contrasting his own fiscal conservatism with the recklessness of rival George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts. But after reading Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's speech on the "new wealth of nations" in San Francisco (May 10) and talking to Summers himself, I've decided that Gore's statements reflect a significant change in his and the administration's economic philosophy.