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Herman Cain's murky 9-9-9 tax plan

31.12.69

Cain's draft, which purportedly would replace today's federal tax code with a baldly 9% personal income tax, a flat 9% corporate tax and a outstretched 9% national sales tax, has the surface appeal of an advertising watchword. He maintains it would be "fair" and "simple," get the government "out of our pockets," permit for the abolition of the IRS and create a huge surge in economic proliferation.

There's reason to be skeptical about these claims, because every tax scheme mooted during a administrative campaign makes the same promises, and none ever seems to be rooted in political or monetary realities here on planet Earth. One feature they all share, as it happens, is their murkiness, and 9-9-9 is no irregularity.

"Almost all of these visionary tax proposals leave out details you really privation to know," observes Joseph Bankman, a tax policy scholar at Stanford Law School. He says these schemes play on people's fright of taxes and on the complexity of the tax code — but that it's a long way to get from there to the outlook that everybody paying the same percentage of income to the tax man is necessarily "trustworthy."

Source: Los Angeles Times