Ben White writes:
Conventional wisdom holds that Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential announcement on Monday will get washed away by all the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s official launch a day ago.
The conventional wisdom is wrong.
In fact, the Florida Republican now has an opportunity to present himself as everything Clinton is not: a young, relatively little known political figure largely free of major scandal and other baggage who is running on a clear platform promising faster economic growth.
Seems right to me.
White also links to an article he wrote last week on the tax plan Senator Rubio has proposed with Senator Mike Lee. White characterizes the plan as a break with decades of Republican orthodoxy. It may be unhelpful to say it, since it’s generally considered a good thing to be fresh, bold, and new, but this characterization seems to me to be overstated. The plan cuts the top tax rate to 35 percent, which is in the ballpark of a lot of previous Republican proposals. It’s the rate George W. Bush won from a Republican Congress, for example. The plan expands the child credit, as the Contract with America and Bush called for. And it raises marginal tax rates on some people, though on a smaller number of people than previous proposals from Steve Forbes and Rand Paul (who now seems to be promising a plan that avoids a rate hike). The features of the plan that White presents as novel are a return to tradition.
Where the plan differs from previous Republican plans is in its size. The Rubio plan cuts taxes on investment by more than any previous nominee has sought; on that issue the plan is comparable to the Forbes platforms of yesteryear. The child credit is larger than in previous proposals. And the overall size of the tax cut is very large (although not, apparently, as large as Paul’s will be). That overall size, as I’ve suggested a few times in this space, is probably too big, at least unless we restrain entitlement spending. But that’s the place to look if you want to find a place where the plan breaks new ground.