The conference is patterned after the economic summit hosted by Bush in Waco, Tex., in August 2002. But where the Waco summit was sparked by political concerns over pervasive economic gloom at the time, this week's conference was designed to focus narrowly on the president's specific legislative priorities.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said preparations for the conference began before Thanksgiving, but several participants said in interviews that they were asked to attend less than two weeks ago. Many of them were drawn from the Waco participant list.
"This has all come together, at least from my perspective, relatively quickly," said Brian Wesbury, chief economist at the Chicago investment firm Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson Inc., who discussed small-business regulations in Waco and will speak on the economy today.
Buchan said participants will represent a diversity of opinions on Social Security, taxes, civil suits, health care and fiscal policy.
Still, many attendees aren't shy about their pro-Bush leanings. June Lennon, an accountant in Greenville, S.C., who is on tap for the panel on taxes, co-chaired a lobbying push by the National Federation of Independent Business in the 1990s to scrap the entire tax code. Jack Stack, president and chief executive of SRC Holding Corp., a manufacturer in Springfield, Mo., said he would use the forum to protest the costs imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate responsibility law.
Bush has yet to detail how he intends to overhaul Social Security and the tax code, but lobbyists and interest groups believe the outlines are clear.
The Social Security plan will look something like the second of three options presented in 2001 by Bush's Social Security Commission. That option would allow workers to divert just over 2 percent of their pay -- or a third of their share of the Social Security payroll tax -- into personal investment accounts, tightly managed by the federal government. Once the accounts reach $5,000, the government would consider shifting their management to private investment firms on Wall Street.
On tax overhaul, interest groups are looking to a report prepared by the Treasury Department in late 2002 that details five options. The fifth, which takes an incremental approach to tax changes, has been seized on as a likely road map.
Under that option, the president would seek the repeal of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that was designed to ensure the rich pay taxes but increasingly ensnares the middle class. The plan also would beef up incentives for savings, repeal the deduction for state and local taxes, increase the standard deduction, reduce the number of brackets and tax most Social Security benefits and employer-provided health benefits.
Health care lobbyists have already mobilized to try to save tax preferences for health insurance.
One senior health care lobbyist for a major business group said White House economists have already backed off the idea of ending the employer tax deduction for the cost of health insurance.
Now lobbyists hope to scuttle the idea of making workers pay income taxes on the value of their health insurance.
