It is disheartening and amusing to read about the potential Republican candidates for next year’s presidential election.
First there was Michele Bachmann, an updated version of Sarah Palin. Then Rick Perry, a “conservative to the core” according to his campaign videos. Mitt Romney, who tries so hard to be the favorite, but is ignored for Chris Christie who isn’t even running. Ron Paul has always been in the background, somehow winning straw polls but never taken seriously. And now we have Herman Cain, the candidate who boasts about knowing nothing and uses his inexperience as a positive.
Not only is the GOP turning the election into a circus, it keeps picking losing frontrunners in a downhill battle to come up with a halfway decent candidate.
Cain, with 26 percent of the vote in the latest polls, leads the GOP candidates. His campaign leans heavily on his “9-9-9” plan, intended to be a model for economic renewal. It states that production is the real key to stimulating the economy — not spending, and defies conventional wisdom and standard fiscal policy. Economists agree that spending does stimulate the economy and although trickle-down economists argue that giving money to the upper 1 percent will help by reinvesting in business to increase production, it has not been proven to work of Cain’s plan.
In phase one all taxes are replaced by a flat 9 percent tax for businesses, individual incomes and a national sales tax is instituted of the same rate. This is intended to “expand GDP by $2 trillion, create six million new jobs, increase business investment by one third, and increase wages by 10 percent,” according to Cain’s website. It shifts the tax burden from corporations and the wealthy to the poor and middle class. A study released earlier this week by the Tax Policy Center found that Cain’s plan would increase taxes for 84 percent of Americans.
It also decreases taxes on corporations from 35 percent to 9 percent, which further cuts taxes on the wealthy while increasing taxes for the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay income tax because they cannot afford it. Cain has alluded that his plan contains an exception for people not making enough, but there is no wording describing such an exception.
On their own, the individual taxes and corporate tax cuts negatively impact the poor — Cain’s proposed sales tax is the finishing touch. Having a flat national sales tax is a regressive tax, which would mean that the poor, who spend their entire income, would be paying more in sales tax relative to their income than the wealthy, who do not spend their entire annual incomes.
In Idaho, this plan would increase the sales tax by 50 percent of the current amount, while adding taxes to states that do not currently have them, like Washington, which does not tax food, and Oregon, which has no sales tax.
With a plan that will hurt the majority of U.S. citizens, a lack of strategy, no experience, and a questionable ability to handle situations like his current scandal, the only question that should be asked of Cain is “How did he get this far?”