The crusade for tax reform, free trade, a sound dollar, and Obamacare repeal got a big lift on Wednesday when House GOP leaders chose Kevin Brady of Texas to replace newly elected Speaker Paul Ryan as chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which has oversight over the $3.5 trillion tax system, the 14 percent of our economy devoted to health care, the $1 trillion welfare system, and laws governing trillions of dollars in international trade. With Ryan running the show in the full House and Brady running Ways and Means, the table is well set for seismic fiscal reforms in 2017 — provided a Republican wins the White House.
Mr. Brady is bald and soft-spoken, with a definite Texas drawl. In an interview this week, I ask him to outline his priorities for the committee. He says he wants to “follow in Paul Ryan’s footsteps and get some version of a flat tax or consumption tax through.” He believes that the 25 percent corporate tax rate proposed by then–Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp in early 2014 wasn’t enough. “I want to go a lot lower than that,” he says, mentioning a rate of 15 to 20 percent. “American companies can’t compete on a global scale with our rates so high.”
“I see this [tax reform] as the number-one competitiveness issue facing the country,” he says. “Our defective tax code is a major reason the U.S. isn’t growing faster.” I ask whether a flat tax or a consumption tax would be his ideal. “I’ve always intuitively liked the consumption-tax model,” he replies. Actually doing away with the income tax is a high political hurdle to clear, but Brady clearly wants to nudge the system in that direction.
Brady is an unflinching free trader at a time when Trumpism may be swaying the party toward tariffs and walls.
He is an unflinching free trader at a time when Trumpism may be swaying the party toward tariffs and walls. “I view the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] as essential for growth,” he says. “We can thrive under a free-trade regime around the world with lower tariffs and barriers, and we have to lead the world in making that happen.”
On health care, Brady views Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare as major drivers of ruinous deficit spending in Washington and won’t flinch when it comes to reforming them. “I want to give consumers way more choices in health care,” he explains. “Choice and competition are the way to go. In every other industry these are the forces that drive down costs.”
#share#Brady has also led the charge on monetary reform, an important, under-covered issue. He’s one of the chief sponsors of a bill to create a commission that would find ways to rein in Janet Yellen and her colleagues. “I’m a strong-and-stable-dollar advocate, and the Fed has been moving dangerously away from that mission,” he says. In his previous post, as the lead Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, Mr. Brady was a vocal critic of the Fed. He also helped produce some of the seminal congressional studies of Barack Obama’s miserable economic performance, showing that the country’s GDP growth is at least $2 trillion behind where it would normally be in the recovery from a recession.
#related#What happens if we get a Republican president, House, and Senate in 2017? Will we finally be able to enact game-changing free-market reforms in government, or will paralysis prevail? Brady is an optimist. “I believe America’s ready for these big reforms and that this is the path back to rapid growth.”
America has been stuck with low growth, slow job creation, and flattened wages for a decade now, and Washington is mostly to blame. But this week the prospects for a turnaround got just a bit brighter.
— Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Fox News contributor.