That is such an unfair characterization. She believes they should pray themselves straight. And that her husband is the perfect facilitator for that effort. He has a certain way of “connecting” with gays, or so it would appear.
Same difference. He attaches them to his pole and things get hot.
But we digress.
Are you familiar with the VAT as used in the UK? As I understand it, Cain’s proposal is similar to a value-added tax. It seems to work in the UK. Why, specifically, don’t you comprehend it?
I suspect that’s not what he finds incomprehensible. It’s probably Cain’s reassurance that “The sales tax only applies to people who buy new goods, not used goods,” coupled with the idea that necessities (food, medicine, etc., which likely make up the lion’s share of what the poor spend their money on) are fundamentally always “new goods”.
VAT doesn’t apply to most foods (except junk foods and restaurant meals) and prescription medicines (but does apply to OTC medicine). However, the UK doesn’t have local sales taxes to deal with - no city or state or whatever add-ons.
What I have never seen mentioned about the “999” plan: If you immediately slap a 9% surcharge on every item sold in the whole country, won’t that grind whatever meager recovery we have to a halt?
As much as I hate income tax, sales taxes are even worse during down times.
I don’t know why anyone is paying any attention to the whole 9-9-9 thing other than pointing and laughing. It’s ridiculous; it will never pass, nor will anything even close to it; it will raise taxes tremendously on many lower income people.
Because it tells you a lot about the depth of the candidate. 999 is stupid, but the guy proposing it shows his stupidity by keeping at it. Cain is a joke.
That has been my opinion for a while now. No reasonable person in their right (in both ways) mind would think that Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Paul, or Gingrich would be in any way viable candidates. In past years, Paul has clearly been the lunatic fringe of the campaign, but now, in this crowd, he’s actually considered reasonable.
Using these batshit politicians as supposed early runners is a ploy to make the eventual candidates (who I believe will be Romney/Perry) look “normal.”
Interesting letter in the paper this morning. A local retiree (who has no payroll taxes, obviously) redid his 2010 taxes using Cain’s proposal. The result was that he would have paid 260 times what he paid in 2010. He didn’t show his math, of course, but this seems like a deal killer for anybody who takes the time to figure out Cain’s plan.
The Koch brothers have always backed Cain. He’s basically been the spokesman for Americans for Prosperity for a while now.
Yeah, it’s retirees that really get screwed from a change from income taxes (which they have already paid for 30 or 40 years) to consumption taxes (now that they are in the “consumption only” phase of life).
The other group that gets screwed is those that use the EITC and other credits to zero out their federal income tax contribution. They now have a 9% income tax liability (replacing their current payroll tax liability) plus 9% on consumption. This is a pretty hefty hike on a low income.
Any sort of transition to this type of taxation scheme would need to be phased in gradually, and have some sort of age- and income-related rebate or pre-bate on the consumption tax portion.
For all the problems I have with Mr. Cain, I’m somewhat surprised the “neocon” response is getting as much attention as it is. While I doubt he is truly “unfamiliar” with the term, I think given the context of his remarks he was (awkwardly) trying to say that he doesn’t want to be labeled as a neocon. It’s somewhat similar to how folks on the left prefer to be called “progressive” rather than “liberal”, since the latter term carries (fairly or not) unwelcome political baggage.
Mr. Cain’s response regarding the border also deserved a little more scrutiny. I’ll allow himthe benefit of saying the electric fence was a joke (though I’m not sure what the joke really is), but he did say during the interview that federal troops would be required to secure the border. I’m not sure how platoons of soldiers armed with automatic weapons roaming the southwest would be any more palatable than a long electric fence.
Regarding the 9-9-9 plan and the comment regarding used goods, Bricker is correct that this is a long way round to describing a VAT; I think this is also why Cain insisted that it was completely separate from the states’ sales tax. For VAT, tax is excised on the value added to a product by the seller at each stage of the process. Each seller, of course, builds the cost of the VAT he/she pays into the price at his/her stage, so ultimately the final price the consumer sees is 9% higher than expected (wikipedia has a pretty good comparison of a sales tax vs VAT scheme). For used goods, this same step-by-step process is still at work: If my car is worth $10K (i.e. assume that’s the bluebook price), and I sell it to a used car lot for $10K, there is no VAT on the sale, but if they turn that car and sell it for, say, $11K, then VAT is assessed on that extra $1000 (I’m vastly simplifying here).
If Cain is really proposing a VAT, the administrative and enforcement costs of such a tax are much greater than a sales tax so I think it will ultimately collect less than what’s being proposed (which isn’t much to begin with). Plus it’s clearly regressive, since the poor spend a higher percentage of their income than the wealthy. But for me, the real crime in 9-9-9 is the exemption for investment income–why Gregory didn’t press this point more is beyond me.
Is it? The descriptions I’ve read just makes it sound like a sales tax at the final point of sale. I went to Cain’s website, but his 999 pdf is two pages long, one of which is a giant picture of Cain and the other has one bullet point devoted to the sales tax. Nothing in it makes it sound like anything other then a simple sales tax.
And what few people have really mentioned (perhaps because of the dearth of info out there) is that the 999 thing is just a stepping stone. I’ve heard Cain say at least once that downstream it because a straight national sales tax with all other federal taxes eliminated. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but he’s sure not bringing it up a lot now that he’s being perceived as as serious candidate.
The thing that stood out to me is that he defered to family decision-making in instances of incest. Like, really? Do we really want to leave abortion up to the family even when it’s family that caused the pregnancy in the first place?
The phrasing of the thread title is giving me Bob Dole flashbacks.
FWIW, he’s now saying he was joking about it being a joke, and is back to being serious about it. Its unclear if this is in fact a meta-meta-joke, in which case he still may be joking.
Wow, he still has room for another whole page of explanation!
You can see in his face that he wasn’t joking. The most rank amateur politician wouldn’t have said something that stupid if he was running for POTUS. Oh wait: he just did. The man is a loose canon and should not be holding any public office.