Pawlenty's Growth Marker
The GOP candidate lays out an ambitious economic agenda.
Among GOP Presidential contenders, Tim Pawlenty is offering the most ambitious reform agenda so far, and his economic address yesterday continued the trend. While details remain to be filled in, the former Minnesota Governor is rightly focusing on a growth revival that ought to define the 2012 campaign.
Most notable in symbolic political terms, Mr. Pawlenty proposed what he called the "big, positive goal" of growing the U.S. economy by 5% a year over the next decade. His policy mix is centered on building a durable expansion and boosting middle-class incomes, and his speech was notable for its optimism, avoiding the austerity temptation that traps many Republicans.
A Pawlenty spokesman told us the 5% target is realistic and achievable, and it's true that the economy grew 4.9% on average between 1983 and 1987, and nearly 4.7% between 1996 and 1999. Yet such long booms are rare in developed economies and we can't recall one that lasted 10 years.
The goal is still worthy as an aspiration, especially amid the current recovery that should be far stronger after a long and deep recession. The recovery has reached 5% only in the last quarter in 2009, and that was mostly the result of businesses rebuilding inventories that had been cut to the bone. Growth has since slowed to 2% or below, failing to reach cruising speed despite (or in our view because of) the entire liberal playbook of government spending, temporary and targeted tax incentives, new entitlements and regulation, and monetary reflation.
Mr. Pawlenty would extricate the economy from this government cul de sac by enhancing the incentives to work, invest and create jobs. He sketched out yesterday a Reagan-like tax reform of lower rates for individuals and businesses. The first $50,000 in individual income ($100,000 for couples) would be taxed at 10% and after that a top marginal rate of 25%. This would give a big lift to the small and medium-sized businesses that file under the individual tax code and create most new jobs. He'd also zero out taxes on capital gains, dividends and estates.
Mr. Pawlenty says that families earning under $50,000 would pay an effective income tax rate of 0%, because he would maintain tax benefits like those for mortgage interest or the child credit that use the tax code as social policy. Mr. Pawlenty is right not to buy into the liberal objection that tax reform must be revenue neutral according to scoring rules that assume no growth dividend, but minimizing tax credit carve-outs would raise revenue by making the tax code more efficient.
The Minnesotan is on firmer ground with his corporate tax overhaul, which would reduce the rate to 15% from the current 35% in return for cleaning out the warren of loopholes and special favors. Businesses will expand, enlarge their payrolls and repatriate overseas earnings. The added benefit is that most corporate welfare is dispensed through the tax code—so a flatter, simpler system will reduce political mediation of the economy and the resulting misallocation of capital. It is both a pro-growth tax policy and government reform.
Mr. Pawlenty would also limit Washington's damage by paring the regulatory overreach that has defined the last three years and by curbing spending over time to 18% of GDP (from 24% today), which is the historical revenue average and is also crucial for economic revival. One test for all of the candidates will be how they propose to reform Medicare and other entitlements that account for about three-fifths of federal expenditures. The economy won't improve until the political class restrains its appetites.
More problematic is Mr. Pawlenty's endorsement of a balanced budget amendment. Leave aside that changing the Constitution is (rightly) a very heavy political lift, and that short-term deficits can be useful, as in the 1980s to finance the defense buildup that helped to end the Cold War. The more fundamental problem is that a balanced budget rule can easily become an excuse to raise taxes, as it often has at the state level. Mr. Obama would gladly balance the budget at 24% of GDP, or more.
Mr. Pawlenty also touched on monetary policy, stressing "a strong dollar" as a proxy for stable prices. Inflation is the great thief of the middle class—even if it has so far showed up largely in food and energy—and Mr. Pawlenty wants to end the Federal Reserve's impossible dual political mandate for stable prices and maximum employment. The long-term effect of such engineering is often inflation and bubbles, and Mr. Pawlenty would be wise to educate voters about the Fed's role in fomenting the housing mania of the last decade.
The larger task for Mr. Pawlenty going forward is to put these policy choices into a larger economic narrative, explaining to voters why the prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s ended, how Mr. Obama's policies have damaged the recovery, and how his own policies will revive middle-class incomes. Now that Mr. Pawlenty has laid down his marker, what do his competitors have to offer?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304474804576371592713487096.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopIt really says a lot about the Dems when someone who just announced their intention to run for President beats them to the table with a deficit-reducing plan.
Good start on TPaw's part. A lot to like and some not to like. Takes balls to throw a plan this radical out there, though. Perhaps the far-left pussies could learn something from that but I doubt it.
