Jon Huntsman 2012: What Are His Positions?

Huntsman's official economic plan does not mention entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but he has discussed his proposals on the campaign trail on a few occasions. In September, he told CNN that he would raise the retirement age in order to reduce the government's Social Security and Medicare obligations, change the formula by which cost-of-living adjustments are determined and reduce benefits for high-income individuals. He did not specify what the new retirement age would be or how he would change the cost-of-living formula.

He has actually taken a more conservative stance than his opponents on Medicare, telling ABC News in May that he would have voted for the controversial budget plan proposed by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., which would have completely privatized Medicare so that the government didn't have to pay for any of it. "I would've voted for it," he said, "including the Medicare provisions, because the only thing that scares me more than that is the trajectory that our debt is taking. ... We've got to be bold, and we've got to have proposals on the table that perhaps in years past would've been laughed out of the room, and we've got to look seriously at them. We don't have a choice."

Health care:

Like every other candidate in the 2012 Republican race, Huntsman wants to repeal President Barack Obama's "unconstitutional and unaffordable" health care law. In terms of broad reforms, he wants to streamline the Food and Drug Administration's approval process to make it less expensive for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to develop health care products. But his economic plan includes few other proposals for addressing problems like the high cost of health care and the inaccessibility of affordable insurance for many Americans.

Some clues can be found by looking at the health care reform plan he developed as governor of Utah, which involves a health insurance exchange through which individuals and small businesses can purchase a private insurance plan of their choice. This, the conservative Heritage Foundation argues, "put[s] downward pressure on health care costs while empowering consumers to make their own health care decisions." Huntsman said at a recent Republican debate that he would support a similar plan as president, but that he would leave it to the states to "experiment and find breakthroughs in how we address health care reform."

Although he does not specifically mention the health care implications of his tax-reform plan, Huntsman's proposal to cut all credits and deductions from the tax code would eliminate the tax exemption for employer-sponsored health insurance, which totals $300 billion a year and "incentivize[s] employers to purchase insurance for their workers, tax-free, instead of giving that money to employees as salary and letting them by insurance for themselves," Avik Roy writes in a Forbes blog post. This change, he argues, would help solve the problems inherent in the employer-based health insurance system: "overspending on extraneous health benefits, the lack of price- and value-consciousness on the part of patients and the lack of health insurance portability that makes people afraid to leave, or lose, their jobs."

Job creation:

Huntsman's job-creation plan involves lowering tax rates for both individuals and corporations, thus encouraging investment and economic growth. In particular, he argues that lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent would discourage outsourcing and so keep more jobs in the United States.