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<DIV align=left><SPAN class="timestamp published"
title=2011-10-13T20:30:06+00:00>October 13, 2011, <SPAN>8:30 pm</SPAN></SPAN>
<H3 class=entry-title>Cold Pizza from Herm Cain</H3>
<ADDRESS class="byline author vcard">By <A class="url fn"
title="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/
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href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/timothy-egan/">TIMOTHY
EGAN</A></ADDRESS>
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<P class=summary><A
title="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/
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href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/">Timothy
Egan</A> on American politics and life, as seen from the West.</P></DIV>
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<H4>Tags:</H4>
<P class="meta tags"><A href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/gop/"
rel=tag>G.O.P.</A>, <A
href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/herman-cain/" rel=tag>herman
cain</A>, <A href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/taxes/"
rel=tag>taxes</A></P>
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<P>By almost any measure — social, political, economic, logical — Herman Cain’s
9-9-9 tax plan is nuts, nuts, nuts. Go ahead and jack up the price of nearly
everything that moves in the United States with a 9 percent national sales tax
on all new purchases and services. Talk about instant branding: every time you
buy something, you’ll be hit with the Herm Cain tax at the checkout line.</P>
<P>And this is just the start. The nearly 50 million filers whose main federal
tax is now a payroll deduction and not an income tax would see their overall
bill from the government increase by nearly 100 percent. This conclusion comes
from the economists and fact-checkers who have actually looked at the napkin
sketch of a plan Cain got from some accountant friend of his in Cleveland.</P>
<P>In essence, Cain is proposing the largest shift in tax burden from the
wealthy to the poor and middle class in the nation’s history. Oh, and he
apparently would scrap the two great government programs that keep millions
clinging to fragile middle-class status — Social Security and Medicare — because
he wants to eliminate the payroll taxes that now pay for those insurers of
dignity.<BR><BR>We are forced to seriously consider this bizarro-world,
reverse-Robin-Hood scheme, one that would junk the entire federal tax code for a
9 percent flat rate on corporate earnings, personal income and retail sales,
because of the astonishing news that Republicans have elevated Cain to the top
of their field in three polls released over the last 48 hours.</P>
<DIV class="w151 right module">
<DIV class=entry>Related
<UL class=refer>
<LI><A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/13/whats-so-bad-about-a-flat-tax">Room
for Debate: What’s So Bad About a Flat Tax? </A></LI></UL></DIV>
<P></P></DIV>
<P>Not to worry: fruit flies on a bad apple have a longer life than does a
front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. Cain’s reign will be
short because his central plan is pure craziness, even for Republicans.</P>
<P>Let’s say you buy a new car or a week’s worth of groceries, or pay $2,000 for
your kid’s dental work. Cain would add 9 percent to the price of those
transactions — on top of the 9 percent in sales taxes people already pay in some
states, like Washington, where I live. And if you’re lower middle class, there
would be no income tax offset — but an increase!</P>
<P>That’s the Cain platform: raise the price of everything in the worse economic
crisis since the Great Depression.</P>
<P>So how did Cain float to the top, at least for a week? He’s a motivational
speaker, and a good one. He’s glib, optimistic, likeable, and has a great
personal story. But he has zero governing experience. And his business forte was
running a national food chain, Godfather’s, when they made truly awful-tasting
pizzas. (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on their post-Cain
pizzas.)</P>
<P>Cain tops the polls because almost three-quarters of Republican primary
voters cannot come around to their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. And the rest of
the field lose voters every time they open their mouths.</P>
<P>In Tuesday’s debate, Newt Gingrich showed why he is a prevaricator with
preternatural talent, finding new and creative ways to revive old and
discredited lies. He trotted out the 2009 “lie of the year” winner by
Politifact.com — that death panels would decide who gets to live under the new
health care law.</P>
<P>He also called for jailing the congressional architects of a new law to curb
the kind of uncontrolled manipulations by bankers and Wall Street traders that
brought down the global economy. You heard that right: he doesn’t want the
people who dreamed up all those explosive credit default swaps and derivative
trades to go to jail; he wants to incarcerate the reformers.</P>
<P>Cain’s ideas are actually worse: he would give Wall Street speculators more
money. Under his plan, a billionaire now paying only 15 percent federal taxes on
investment income — a lower rate, as Warren Buffett notes, than his secretary
pays — would get a 40 percent reduction.</P>
<P>Last month’s frontrunner, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, offered up fresh material
for the all-hat-no-cattle label he seems determined to wear. To his prior
proclamations that evolution is “a theory that’s out there,” and global warming
is a hoax, this dream candidate of Rush Limbaugh put the American Revolution in
the 16th century. Amazing, the things Thomas Jefferson could do in his 235th
year.</P>
<P>Oh, but there were some critics of Cain-o-nomics. Michele Bachmann noted that
the 9-9-9 design, turned upside down, was a Satanic 6-6-6.</P>
<P>The power of his plan, Cain replies to all criticism, is its simplicity. “I
can explain it in a minute!” he says. But someone who has taken more than a
minute with 9-9-9 — Bruce Bartlett, the former economic adviser to Presidents
Reagan and George H. W. Bush — has called it “insane.” Read his examination <A
title="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/inside-the-cain-tax-plan/
CTRL + Click to follow link"
href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/inside-the-cain-tax-plan/">in
his Times blog here</A>.</P>
<P>Cain is unelectable, and his plan is toxic. This gets Republicans back to the
one person they cannot yet get their arms around: Willard Mitt Romney, an
unflappable technocrat with a Harvard M.B.A. who passed a bold socialist health
care plan that is a model for the nation, and once professed that he would be
stronger on gay rights than Teddy Kennedy. Bring on the general
election.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Verdana>____________________________________</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Verdana>Wayne A. Fox<BR><A
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