Ezra Klein has a rundown of Jon Huntsman's "job plan" that he released yesterday.
In other words, Huntsman’s plan raises trillions in new revenues by cleaning out the income-tax code -- which means it raises income taxes -- and then it plows that money into large tax cuts for corporate profits and income derived from dividends and capital gains. Both of those are taxes that fall disproportionately on the wealthy. So Huntsman’s plan increases taxes on most Americans in order to pay for very large tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.But more than even the description I think Ezra's description of Huntsman perfectly encapsulates his super-long shot campaign.
It’s also a plan that doesn’t have anything particular to say about a pretty extraordinary moment in the economy: everything in it, save for the repeal of various Obama-related initiatives, could have been in the Republican platform in 2005, or 2001 or 1996.It's not that Jon Hutnsman is moderate in any sense of how we've understood that word for the last decade. He's just a traditional right-wing Republican from the days before the oil companies funded the John Birch society types to re-brand the Republican party as the tea party.