The Huntsman Tax Plan

By W. James Antle, III 

Some details of Jon Huntsman's tax reform proposal are starting to emerge. Huntsman would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, as well as taxes on capital gains and dividends. He'd scrap the existing personal tax code and replace it with three lower rates: 8 percent, 14 percent, and 23 percent He would zero out all loopholes, credits, and deductions, though I am awaiting confirmation on mortgage interest and charitable giving.

Huntsman would reduce the marginal corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, one point lower than the OECD average. Reuters' Jim Pethokoukis is a believer: "The Hunstman tax plan is -- easily -- the most pro-growth proposal ever offered by a US presidential candidate."

UPDATE: It's been confirmed that all the deductions would go, according to this plan.

Huntsman’s Great (Pre-Recession) Jobs Record

NOAH KRISTULA-GREEN

Jon Huntsman has unveiled his jobs plan and it is accompanied by an impressive web video touting Huntsman’s success in job creation. The video argues that Huntsman not only has a good jobs plan, but that his record as governor is also worth running on. The video says that Utah is the “#1 State in Job Creation”.
But wait! I thought it was Rick Perry who had the best job creation talking point? What happened to the idea that the place to find job creation was in Rick Perry’s “Texas Miracle”?

The key to understanding the quote is the source. It comes from a National Review blog post by Katrina Trinko from June of 2011 which compared the job creation record of different GOP governors over time. Here is why Huntsman does well:

Among the crowd who governed primarily during the 2000s, Huntsman has the best record. During his 2005 to 2009 tenure as governor of Utah, the number of jobs grew by 5.9 percent.

Trinko acknowledges up front that there are a lot of problems with using this method to measure job creation. The candidate who has the absolute best record under this system is actually Gary Johnson, but he governed New Mexico during the boom years of the 1990’s.
So she also looked at job creation achieved by governors over the same period of time, to try and be a bit more fair:

During Huntsman’s tenure, January 2005 to August 2009, Utah had the best overall job-growth rate of any state in the nation [5.9%]. In that same time frame, Perry’s job-growth rate was 4.9 percent. Pawlenty’s job-growth rate was negative: The number of jobs in Minnesota decreased by 1.8 percent.

Its still a good number and nothing to be bashful about, but it is also clear that it is a number that from his work before the recession.
So an important reality check on Huntsman’s new talking point might be: “#1 State in Job Creation before the recession really hit.”