The guy with the momentum is former entrepreneur and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He's signed an anti-tax pledge, bemoaned excessive regulation, called for cheaper energy with domestic drilling, and laid out (in detailed Power Point presentations) the coming fiscal disasters that are Social Security and Medicare. He took another plunge yesterday, unveiling a broad-strokes tax agenda.

While short on details, he laid out a marker for the field, calling for lower marginal tax rates, a more competitive corporate tax and the end of the death tax. This isn't necessarily a surprise, given Mr. Romney's economic team is largely made up of the Bush tax-cut brain trust, including former Council of Economic Advisers chief Glenn Hubbard, his successor, Greg Mankiw, and Brian Reardon. Mr. Romney also scored a coup with economist John Cogan, who knows budgets inside-out, and is a tax-cutter to boot.

What attracted many of these economists to the Romney team was the former governor's success, in a liberal state, of beating back big-tax proposals and instead choosing to erase deficits by hacking away at spending. Mr. Romney's challenge will now be in convincing economic conservatives that his tax plan, and other pro-growth talk, is more than just election rhetoric. In particular, he'll need to do some explaining about his Massachusetts health-care plan, which Mr. Romney touted as a market-based reform, but was more about new government regulation.

The team least happy with this early Romney tax marker is surely John McCain's. The super-senator has been unable to get much traction with this second bid for the White House, thanks in part to conservatives' distrust of his economic credentials. The maverick was born out of the old austerity wing of the GOP, tough on spending, big on balanced budgets, grave about the need for entitlement reform. These were the traits Mr. McCain stressed in his last run, and by the look of his new team, little will change this time around.

Almost everything is off the record at the Club for Growth's "winter" conference, but I can say that the dozen or so attendees to whom I spoke after Mitt Romney's speech were impressed.

Since the campaign issued a press release about the speech, I can also comment a little about its contents. Romney hit every one of the club's buttons. He came out against most trade barriers, for reductions in marginal tax rates, against the "death tax," for cuts in corporate tax rates to make our rates comparable to those of other countries, for federal tort reform, and for scaling back Sarbanes-Oxley. He repeated his call for federal spending to shrink by one percent in real terms every year.

A few attendees complained about the vagueness of Romney's proposals. While he has come out for more detailed and substantial tax cuts than Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, or Fred Thompson, he didn't say what corporate and personal income tax rates he wanted, or offer an estimate of the budget impact of his tax cuts. On Social Security, he spoke against tax cuts but otherwise merely offered a list of options—with personal accounts the last one on the list.

All in all, it seems like a perfectly fine economic plan if you're looking for a conventional conservative platform and a smart businessman to sell it. I don't think it is a great tax plan for the general election, however, and Republicans need one.

Labels: club for growth, Taxes