Romney bets on tax cuts to win

After his well-received speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference here last week, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney met with two key leaders in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

Mr. Romney’s dinner guests were Jack Kemp, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts that lifted the economy out of a deep recession, and former Rep. Vin Weber of Minnesota, a key leader in the Opportunity Society band of House warriors who fought for lower tax rates to spur economic growth and entrepreneurial expansion.

Mr. Kemp has not signed on to any Republican presidential campaign as yet, but he likes Mr. Romney’s emphasis on further cutting taxes on investment and savings and overhauling the tax code. Mr. Weber, who was a supporter of Sen. John McCain in the 2000 presidential primaries, has joined Mitt Romney’s team and is encouraging Mr. Kemp to climb aboard early.

That meeting illustrates how much importance Mr. Romney places on tax cuts in his presidential bid and on economic advisers who share his belief in the Reagan economic model. Ronald Reagan made tax cuts his domestic centerpiece, and Mr. Romney intends to do the same in his campaign for the Republican nomination.

In a PowerPoint presentation at the Detroit Economic Club last month, complete with an economic slide show, Mr. Romney said the country would face two choices on taxes next year, asking the business leaders, “What is the better course for America? A European model of high taxes and regulations, or low taxes and free trade, the Ronald Reagan model? That’s the choice the next president is going to make,” he said, adding ominously that the Democrats were “already working hard to implement a massive tax increase.”

You can tell a lot about politicians by the people around them, and that is especially true in presidential politics. Mr. Romney has already put together a stellar team of economic heavyweights who include:

c Vin Weber, who is chairman of Mr. Romney’s domestic policy board, in charge of providing him with a broad range of economic proposals and advisers.

c Cesar Conda, a longtime economic policy and tax cut strategist on Capitol Hill, who was chief domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a key player in Republican tax cut battles of the last two decades.

c R. Glenn Hubbard, President Bush’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, who was on the short list last year for Fed chairman. A staunch tax cutter, he has been a key consultant to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System.

c N. Gregory Mankiw, a free market economist at Harvard who chaired Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, and has been an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Congressional Budget Office.

c John Cogan, a Hoover Institution economist who was one of President Bush’s 2000 campaign policy advisers and one of the architects of the Bush tax cut plan. He brings broad economic and budget expertise from a variety of key posts in the Reagan administration.

c Brian Reardon: A tax and budget policy adviser in the Bush White House, he helped put together the president’s 2003 plan to accelerate the tax cuts. He is now an economic consultant.

This is not only a hefty team that Mr. Weber is still building, but one that demonstrates Mr. Romney is attracting a prominent field of advisers around him who are committed Reaganite supply-siders.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and a few others advising him, though he still has to explain why he was one of only two Republican senators to vote against all the Bush tax rate cuts. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has not put together his economic team, though none of his campaign advisers are people who rallied to the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s.

In his Detroit address on the economy, Mr. Romney went beyond the need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, hinting strongly that the income tax rates need to be further reduced. “We need reform of our tax code. We need to move it toward a system that’s encouraging of growth, fairness and simplicity,” he said.

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