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Mitt Romney’s plan for the economy reads like a boardroom presentation at a weekend-long board retreat in Aspen. There are 59 aspects to the plan, it’s comprehensive, it leaves no corner of the economy behind. It’s got Glenn Hubbard behind it. It’s 160 pages with 5 pages of footnotes.
Jon Huntsman laid out his plan in 12 pages. No renowned economists, no footnotes.
Romney and Huntsman each hawked their plans on the op-ed pages of national dailies yesterday: Romney in USA Today, Huntsman in the Wall Street Journal.
So Romney’s op-ed was sitting at the door of most mid-range hotels around the country, while Huntsman’s was on the credenza with the potted flowers near the concierge in the nicer hotels.
The irony is that most of the entrepreneurs and medium-sized business owners who scooped up the USA Today copy outside their doors in the Hampton Inn yesterday morning would do better under Huntsman’s plan. The corporate executives who picked up their Wall Street Journals on the way out of the Four Seasons could be forgiven for having missed Romey’s plan, which was written for them.
Here are the main differences between Huntsman and Romney:
- Huntsman leads his plan with a cut in the individual tax rate to 8%, 14%, and 23%, which helps entrepreneurs and young firm owners who don’t pay the corporate tax rate.
- Romney keeps individual marginal rates the same. He says the tax rates President Bush fought for are “just as important today as they were a decade ago.” Romney prefers instead to cut the corporate rate to 25% (so does Huntsman).
- Huntsman says kill all the loopholes and exemptions in the tax code. All of them. Every single one. They generally benefit the affluent and have nothing to do with fairness.
- Romney’s plan says “In the long run, Mitt Romney will pursue a conservative overhaul of the tax system that includes lower and flatter rates on a broader tax base.” That’s political-class-speak for “I believe broadly in these principles and have absolutely no intention of acting on them.”
- Huntsman makes a priority of patent reform.
- Romney ignores patent reform.
- Huntsman abolishes capital gains taxes once and for all, under the principle that such taxes are double taxation.
- Romney keeps capital gains where they are, but promises as President to get rid of them with an adjusted gross income of under $200,000. Many entrepreneurs will fall above this threshold but not be anywhere close to “rich.”
One thing neither plan had, however, was more stimulus spending or class warfare-based tax policy that one can expect to see in President Obama’s job speech tomorrow. The likelihood of Obama putting forward a pro-growth jobs agenda is about as likely as the Blue Dog Democrats doubling their numbers in Congress in next year’s election. The Huntsman and Romney plans would both be better than whatever our President will propose.