MITT ROMNEY is a turnaround artist. At Bain Capital he seized faltering businesses too blind and bloated to mend themselves, restructured them, then took them public. Now Romney wants to seize and restructure U.S. economic policy. The only difference is that the federal government is already public. Should we let him acquire it?

An underlying nonpartisan truth is that no matter who becomes president, the economy won’t likely improve very quickly during the next four years. As an August Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report points out, downturns brought on by financial crisis—as the Great Recession was—are typically followed by unusually slow recoveries, with gross domestic product (GDP) depressed and unemployment elevated for at least a full decade after. The report also noted that recovery from any recession in which housing prices fall sharply (ring a bell?) will be slow and painful, because the housing market accounts for more than one-quarter of all U.S. investment. If that weren’t enough bad news, the ongoing euro crisis continues to pose significant danger to the U.S. economy.

How would private-equity whiz Romney tackle this assignment? Say President Romney pushes through a permanent extension of all the Bush tax cuts, as he has promised to do. (President Obama would omit those for family income above $250,000.) That would give the economy more stimulus than Obama’s partial extension would, but not a lot more. That’s because the rich wouldn’t use much of their tax cut to boost consumption. And if demand remained low, no amount of investment could persuade bosses to do much hiring. “Cuts in taxes for the rich,” says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, “would spur growth in the Cayman Islands more than in the U.S.”

Then there’s Romney’s own “fairer, flatter, simpler” plan, which would lower all marginal rates by 20 percent, end much taxation on investment, and repeal the alternative minimum tax and the inheritance tax. There’s no point in even estimating the amount of additional stimulus this might produce, because it’s never going to happen. Even if Republicans take the Senate (a coin toss at the moment), Romney won’t have a sufficient margin to push it through. Presidents (alas) don’t have the option to lay off filibustering senators. Romney won’t identify which tax breaks he’d eliminate to pay for his cuts because they’re so big—the Tax Policy Center calculates they would shrink federal revenue by 24 percent. The only way he could cover the shortfall would be to go after the biggest and most popular tax expenditures, like the health insurance exclusion, the pension contribution exclusion, and the mortgage interest deduction.

The Romney campaign whines that the Tax Policy Center study is biased against Romney (it isn’t), and cites a different study by Princeton economist Harvey Rosen (who couldn’t possibly be biased because he was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers). But Rosen’s study assumes elimination of both the mortgage interest deduction and the health exclusion. Scaling these back or phasing them out over time might make good policy sense, but eliminating them all at once—to finance tax cuts for the rich!—would be politically impossible, not to mention financially disastrous, especially to the already-depressed housing market. Probably Romney, in addition to extending Bush’s tax cuts, could push through a (far more modest) trickle-down tax cut of his own. But it wouldn’t be this one.