WASHINGTON – Seeking to jumpstart a national discussion of his ambitious second-term economic agenda, President Bush will hold an economic conference this week to discuss his key priorities: limiting legal liability, making permanent his tax cuts, introducing private Social Security accounts, and reining in the federal deficit.

The participants include administration officials, corporate leaders, economists, and lobbyists who largely agree with the president’s economic plans. They will discuss how to achieve such goals in the face of a record budget deficit, a weak dollar, skepticism in Congress over private Social Security accounts, and uncertainty over the costs and prospects of the war in Iraq.

“There are going to be people there who are supportive of ways we can continue to move forward on these policies together to keep the economy growing stronger,” a White House spokesman, Scott McLellan, said Friday.

The president expects to attend two of the six planned sessions to be held Wednesday and Thursday in the Ronald Reagan Building, near the White House, including one entitled “the high costs of lawsuit abuse,” moderated by the secretary of commerce, Don Evans.

The panelists scheduled to discuss limiting legal liability include New York lawyer Philip Howard, author of the book “The Collapse of the Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom”; a professor at Yale Law School, George Priest, who specializes in product liability, and the president and CEO of the retail chain Home Depot, Bob Nardelli, who has been a fund-raiser for the president.

Mr. Bush will also listen to economists and CEOs discuss the “financial challenges” facing the economy. The panel is expected to focus on “the need for spending discipline, budgetary reforms, and entitlement reform, including Social Security,” and will be moderated by the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten.

The panel discussing financial challenges will also include officials from two New York investments banks: the chief investment strategist of Charles Schwab and Co., Liz Ann Sonders, and the senior U.S. economist at JP Morgan Chase, James Glassman.

Other members include the chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Richard Parsons, who was co-chairman of a 2001 presidential commission on strengthening Social Security with Senator Moynihan of New York. Mr. Bush has said the work of that commission, which included a recommendation of private savings accounts, is influencing his thinking about how best to ensure that the system can continue to pay benefits when a large number of baby boomers retire and fewer workers are left to pay into the system.

In a weekend radio address, Mr. Bush said the system is headed toward bankruptcy. “If we do not act soon,” the president warned, “Social Security will not be there for our children and grandchildren.”

Last week, Mr. Bush ruled out raising payroll taxes to cover the estimated $1 trillion to $2 trillion in so-called transition costs of paying benefits to current retirees while simultaneously allowing workers to divert some of their payroll taxes into the proposed accounts. Yesterday, a key congressional advocate of the accounts, Senator Graham of South Carolina, warned the president not to attempt to borrow a large amount to cover the costs, and instead to consider raising the portion of workers’ salaries that are subject to Social Security taxes.

“I think it’s irresponsible to borrow the whole trillion dollars,” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I don’t think you can make the tax cuts permanent, have alternative minimum tax relief, and borrow the entire transition costs, which is over a trillion dollars, and have deficits that we can sustain,” he said.

The deficit will be among the subjects discussed of a panel dedicated to the “state of the economy,” attended by Vice President Cheney, and moderated by the president’s assistant for economic policy, Stephen Friedman.

Private-sector economists and CEOs will debate the ways to ensure “continued growth and job creation.” They include Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration; the chief investment strategist at UBS Wealth Management in New York, Mary Farrell, and the CEO of computer-maker Dell, Kevin Rollins, among others.

The deficit is a challenge to an economy that the Bush administration otherwise considers to be “fundamentally sound,” the current chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, recently said.

The real GDP rose by 4 percent over the past year, the rate of inflation remains moderate, and the unemployment rate of 5.5 percent is down from 6.3 percent last summer.

The deficit, however, can put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out investments, and “offset some of the expansionary effects of the tax cuts, both in the short run and in the long run,” Mr. Mankiw said in a recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

The growing federal deficit hit a record $412.8 billion in 2004. For the 2005 fiscal year, which began October 1, the deficit is already $2 billion ahead of where it was at this time last year, according to the Department of the Treasury.

The administration projects that the deficit as a share of gross domestic product will diminish by more than half over the next five years if Congress avoids more tax cuts and restrains spending growth.

The secretary of the treasury, John Snow, will moderate a panel on “tax and regulatory burdens,” which will include the chief economist of JP Morgan Chase in New York, John Lipsky, as well as businesspeople and tax specialists.

The secretary of labor, Elaine Chao, will also hold a panel, on improving the skills and education of American workers.