WSJ: Treasury Man (John Snow)

Wall Street Journal ^ | December 9, 2004 | Editorial

[OESY]

President Bush finally brought Treasury Secretary John Snow in from the cold yesterday, inviting him to remain in the job for the second term. Mr. Snow accepted, even though he'd been left shivering for more than a week by some nasty White House leaks that he was a short-timer.

We suppose this decision signals continuity in the coming months, which means that economic policy will be dominated by the White House itself. This worked well enough in the first term on tax policy, though we'd note that Mr. Bush's second-term agenda is far more ambitious. We hope that whoever replaces Stephen Friedman to run the National Economic Council inside the White House is a heavyweight and not a political neophyte.

More than one friend of the President's has also mentioned to us in the last few months that there really isn't a genuine free-market conservative left among the senior White House staff. Every successful White House needs a balance between the policy purists and the political pragmatists, and our sense is that in this one the tilt is too much toward the latter. The President and Vice President certainly have the right instincts, but they are too busy to kill every bad idea.

One policy area where Mr. Snow and his Department deserve a larger policy voice is on tax reform. Treasury has substantial resources and historical memory on taxes, neither of which was fully utilized in the last four years. Mr. Snow himself was a member of Jack Kemp's tax reform commission that laid out some highly useful principles and ideas during the mid-1990s. That report is as relevant as ever, and Mr. Bush could do worse than ask Mr. Snow for a briefing on it.