Despite image, Huntsman’s economic agenda leaned right

Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign might not have been embraced by conservative voters, but his financial ideas did earn some plaudits from right-leaning thinkers.

For instance, Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, proposed sweeping away every tax credit and deduction while drastically reducing rates for both individuals and businesses.

And taking a look at Wall Street, Huntsman dinged both his former boss, President Obama, and the GOP candidate he eventually endorsed, Mitt Romney, for not doing enough to rein in the nation’s biggest banks.

{mosads}“Whatever the political outcome, the Huntsman campaign has been a policy success,” James Pethokoukis of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote last week, as Huntsman slogged toward a third-place finish in New Hampshire.

On Monday, Huntsman dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Romney, after failing to gain traction in South Carolina, which holds its primary on Saturday.

Analysts have said that, while Huntsman’s policy proposals leaned to the right, Republican voters viewed him as a centrist — and not the sort of conservative they were in the mood for.

For instance, Rick Santorum — who is vying to emerge as a conservative alternative to the front-running Romney — responded to Huntsman’s endorsement by saying: “Moderates are backing moderates.”

But Huntsman’s tax plan was warmly welcomed by a number of conservative outlets, from The Wall Street Journal editorial page to The Tax Foundation.

The proposal, which built on ideas formulated by Obama’s fiscal commission, would have used only three individual income tax brackets — 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent. In the process, it would have also tossed out tax breaks that have long-held support and have survived past attempts to overhaul the tax code — including the deduction for mortgage interest.

Huntsman also proposed to knock the corporate rate down from 35 percent to 25 percent, and to totally do away with taxes on capital gains and dividends.

According to the right-leaning Tax Foundation, the plan merited a B+, the highest grade given to a Republican presidential contender. Rick Perry’s flat-tax plan came in at a B, while Santorum came in last with a D+.

On the other side of the ideological divide, liberals panned Huntsman’s plan, saying it disproportionately aided the wealthy.

“Mr. Huntsman’s proposal is as impressive as any to date in the GOP presidential field, and certainly better than what we’ve seen from the front-runners,” the Journal editorial page wrote in September, not long after Huntsman rolled out his economic plan.

The former Utah governor also emerged early on as the leading — and largely solitary — critic in the GOP field of the nation’s largest banks. Huntsman argued that these massive institutions are basically guaranteed bailouts in another crisis, because they are too vital to the financial system to be allowed to fail.

Huntsman’s critique came before several GOP candidates started training their fire on financial heavyweights in recent weeks, primarily as a way to blast Romney’s time at private-equity firm Bain Capital.

On his campaign website, Huntsman describes a “Faustian bargain between Wall Street and Washington” that laid the seeds for the financial crisis and resisted meaningful reforms.

In November, the former Utah governor’s campaign rolled out a proposal that would crack down on “too big to fail” banks, assessing a fee on the biggest of the big. The revenue from that fee would go toward lowering corporate taxes, and would grow if banks did not reduce their size and the risk they pose to the financial sector.

Furthermore, Huntsman called for tougher capital requirements on those behemoths.

And in an October editorial in the Journal, Huntsman accused Obama and Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, of not being proactive enough when it came to the biggest banks. 

“The Obama and Romney plan appears to be to cross our fingers and hope no ‘too big to fail’ banks fail on their watch,” he wrote.

Huntsman also called for the derivatives market, a key piece of the 2008 financial crisis, to be made more transparent. Efforts to make dealings in that marketplace less opaque were part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

However, Huntsman did not embrace that law as a whole. He said the financial regulatory overhaul should be repealed, criticizing it as full of “unguided regulatory missiles” like the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.