Jeb Bush is giving a big lunchtime speech at the Detroit Economic Club today. CNN reports that he’ll be pitching “reform conservatism,” a subject I’ve written a lot about. We’ll see what his version is. Now as it happens, The Wall Street Journal this morning has a piece from reporter Bob Davis on reform conservatism, focusing particularly on tax policy (though there is far more to it than that): “’Reformicons’ Put New Twist on Tax Debate — Young Conservatives Push GOP Presidential Candidates to Back Targeted Breaks, Not Just Broad-Based Tax-Rate Cuts.” Here is a quote from my AEI colleage Michael Strain: “For the past 10 years, our biggest issue was whether the top tax rate was 35% or 39.5%. I don’t care anymore.”

In short, conservative reformers place less emphasis on cutting the top marginal income tax rate as a top policy priority. Coincidentally, my new The Week column concerns that very subject. At least on the personal income tax side, my preference is for tax relief for parents – a human capital gains tax cut for the worker creators. But it’s a long stretch of the legs — a Kessel Run-length distance, in fact – between saying that (a) right now cut the top marginal personal income tax rate is not of maximum policy importance and (b) tax rates simply don’t matter. More from the WSJ piece:

The reformicon arguments on taxes are controversial within Republican policy circles, particularly among more established—and older—economists. “To say marginal tax rates don’t matter belies economic analysis,” said Columbia University Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, 56, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers when President George W. Bush cut taxes. “It could be good marketing, but it’s not good economics.”

Other GOP economists argue that focusing on specific tax subsidies also is a losing strategy. Democrats are bound to outbid Republicans when it comes to, say, raising the tax credit for children, and subsidies and credits often backfire, they contend. “I don’t think the government is very good at targeting specific outcomes,” said 57-year-old Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, who also headed President Bush’s economics council.

Except that’s not at all what conservative reformers are arguing. Tax rates are extremely important, whether for workers, entrepreneurs, investors, or corporations. As Reihan Salam explains over at The Corner: “Rather, [conservative reformers] hold that a top marginal tax rates in the neighborhood of 40 percent is less destructive than a top marginal tax rates in the neighborhood of 70 percent, and that there are many factors that influence how responsive work effort is to tax rates.” Second, reformers are not targeting specific outcomes. Instead, they are just letting struggling American families keep a bit more of what they earn to spend on what they want, whether education or a new transmission for their minivan.

Let me end with more from Salam:

There is a natural tendency on the part of reporters, including good reporters like Davis, to ferret out emerging conflicts, as conflicts are more newsworthy than nuanced and ultimately fairly minor disagreements. But I suspect that if reform conservatives sat around a table with Hubbard and Mankiw, they’d quickly reach agreement on what a better tax code might look like.

The real debate is between conservatives who believe that, in the words of Keith Hennessey, “the economy is a garden, not a pie,” and liberals, who believe that the federal government must actively manage the economic life of the nation. Instead of intervening at the micro level through targeted tax policies and burdensome regulations, conservatives believe that the job of the federal government is to provide stable, consistent, transparent, and fair rules to allow for innovation and growth.

Liberals who can’t stand old-fangled conservatives have every reason to feel the same way about the new-fangled kind. If there is a difference between reformicons and other conservatives, it is simply over whether Republicans have done a good job of demonstrating to middle-income Americans that they are as invested in the well-being of ordinary workers as they are in the success of business owners, and whether more efforts should be made to address this question.