Jon Huntsman’s showing in the New Hampshire primary probably wasn’t good enough to keep him in the presidential race much longer. That’s too bad, because on the two most important domestic issues of the day Huntsman has the best policy prescriptions of any of the candidates.

The first is the interplay between the economy and the federal government’s finances.

Huntsman endorsed the most radical tax reform recommended by the debt commission appointed by President Obama. Eliminate all deductions and credits. The highest rate would be 23 percent, compared to today’s 35 percent and the nearly 40 percent Obama has advocated.

Despite the much lower rates, the debt commission estimated that its alternative would raise around $800 billion more in revenue for the federal government over a ten-year period. So, in addition to being more conducive to economic growth, Huntsman’s tax reform, in contrast to that of every other Republican candidate, would reduce the federal debt rather than increase it.

Huntsman also generally endorsed the budget plan of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, including its entitlement reforms. A combination of the debt commission’s tax reform and Ryan’s spending plan is the most politically plausible pathway to bring the federal government’s finances out of the red zone.

The second domestic issue on which Huntsman stands out is financial market reform. The reaction to the stress in financial markets in 2008 demonstrates that politicians and fiscal and monetary policymakers are simply unwilling to let large financial institutions just fail and go through ordinary bankruptcy.

The Obama administration’s approach to preventing bailouts in the future, enacted as the Dodd-Frank reform legislation, is to appoint a committee of wise men to watch over large financial institutions, empowered to tell them what to do if the wise men think they are behaving recklessly.

The Democratic belief in the existence of such regulatory savants is almost touching, similar to a child’s belief in the tooth fairy. But it won’t save the country from future bailouts. What Dodd-Frank really does is to institutionalize the principle of too-big-to-fail.

The only practical alternative is to limit the size of financial institutions to below whatever makes politicians and policymakers comfortable in allowing them to fail. Among the presidential candidates, only Huntsman is proposing to do that.

Huntsman would either directly limit the size and leverage of financial institutions or, better yet, simply impose fees large enough to deter growing beyond a certain size. The latter eliminates the need for huge bureaucracies and avoids the complications inherent in the proposal of former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to segregate the risky activities of large financial institutions from day-to-day banking.

Huntsman’s clarity and boldness on these two most important domestic issues highlight the disappointment that is Mitt Romney, the prohibitive frontrunner.

On taxes, Romney supports keeping the Bush tax rates, but says fundamental individual tax reform of the kind Huntsman is proposing needs to wait for another day. Romney is OK on longer-term entitlement reform, but doesn’t have a plausible or specific short-term proposal to get the country out of the red zone on debt and deficits.

Romney is even more exposed on financial market reform. He supported the bank bailouts in 2008, so he doesn’t advocate just letting market forces take their course. He favors repeal of Dodd-Frank but, unlike Huntsman, hasn’t proposed anything specific to take its place.

Too-big-to-fail is too big an issue to slough off.

Of course, there’s more to being a successful politician than having the best ideas on the biggest issues, and Huntsman just never developed a political presence that demanded attention.

Nevertheless, his ideas deserved a bigger, longer run than Huntsman proved capable of giving them.