Cain’s ‘9-9-9’ tax plan hits poor, helps wealthy, experts say

The Bangor Daily News ^ | Oct. 13, 2011 | JODI ANN FERRIS,Michael A. Fletcher,The Washington Post

[mdittmar]

The “9-9-9” plan that has helped propel businessman Herman Cain to the front of the GOP presidential field would stick many poor and middle-class people with a hefty tax increase while cutting taxes for those at the top, tax analysts say.

The plan would do away with much of the current tax code and impose a 9 percent personal income tax, a 9 percent business tax and a 9 percent national sales tax, which tax experts say would mean that low- and middle-income Americans would pay more.

“Right now, we have a strongly progressive income tax. High-income people are paying a higher share of income in taxes than lower-income people,” said Alan Viard, a former Federal Reserve Bank economist and a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “That is a pattern that would be disrupted by adoption of the Cain plan.”

The 9-9-9 plan has helped define Cain’s candidacy. Coupled with his buoyant, plain-spoken style, it has helped transform the former long shot into a front-runner. Cain has touted the proposal’s apparent simplicity and fairness, but he rarely delves into details in person. His campaign website shows that the plan is only a step toward achieving his ultimate goal: to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service after replacing all federal taxes with a national sales tax.

Meanwhile, analysts said the 9-9-9 part of Cain’s vision would place a further burden on those hit hardest by the nation’s economic problems.

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, is working on an analysis of Cain’s signature policy proposal. Although the plan’s details remain sketchy, Williams said that it would increase taxes for the poor and middle class, despite Cain’s statements to the contrary.

For starters, about 30 million of the poorest households pay neither income taxes nor Social Security or Medicare levies. “So for them, doing away with the payroll tax doesn’t save anything. And you are adding both a 9 percent sales tax and 9 percent income tax. So we know they will be worse off,” Williams said.

At the top end of the income scale, meanwhile, the opposite would occur, he said. The top 1 percent of earners would get a tax cut under Cain’s plan, Williams said.

The nation’s top income earners have reaped the vast majority of the nation’s income growth over the past quarter century, pushing income inequality in the country to levels not seen since the Depression. The tax plan would exacerbate that gap, Williams said.

“People at the top end pay 20 or 21 percent in income and payroll taxes now,” he said. “This plan zeroes out their payroll tax and suddenly their tax is down to 9 percent. Then, like everyone else, they pay 9 percent on what they spend. But the rich don’t spend everything they earn.”

Many conservatives are leery of creating a national sales tax that could be increased in the future.

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea of letting the crowd in Washington have an extra source of revenue,” wrote Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Rich Lowrie, an Ohio money manager who is an economic adviser to Cain, said analysts who call the 9-9-9 plan regressive are not privy to details of its provisions to soften the impact of the tax plan on the poor. The critics are “ignoring the empowerment zone piece that we are rolling out next,” Lowrie said in an email. Lowrie did not explain how the empowerment zones would work, but h e said details would be forthcoming.

Cain, a one-time director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, has said his plan has the twin virtues of fairness and simplicity while creating incentives to boost economic growth and personal wealth.

“It basically empowers the poor rather than being regressive on the poor,” Cain told reporters earlier this week. “I don’t care about rich people. They’re already rich. I want to make it possible for people who are not rich to get rich.”

Cain said his plan would promote increased saving, investment and growth. When the increased growth is factored in, Cain says, the plan would be able to bring in as much money to the federal coffers as the current tax system. Tax analysts have mostly agreed with that assertion, although they cautioned that projections about the plan’s revenue potential are imprecise.

“I cannot promise that the plan is wholly revenue neutral compared to current law,” wrote Edward Kleinbard, a University of Southern California tax expert. “But in fact it should raise a great deal of revenue.”

The tax plan, which Cain has gleefully touted in GOP debates and his public appearances, has helped catapult the former executive to the front of the Republican presidential field, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, as well as a separate survey by the firm Public Policy Polling.

Experts say that adoption of 9-9-9 would mark the most radical federal tax change since the expansion of the income tax in the 1940s. It would upset the vast array of social policy that has been built into the tax code for years by, for example, removing tax breaks that subsidize home purchases and college tuition.

For that reason, many say that its adoption would be highly unlikely, even if Cain were elected president.

Although Cain talks about 9-9-9 as a concise, easy-to-understand plan to reform the sprawling federal tax code, it actually is envisioned as the middle step in moving the nation to a “fair tax” or national sales tax.

The fair tax, which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, R, advocated during his 2008 presidential campaign, is viewed by supporters as efficient and transparent and as a way to encourage investment and broaden the tax base while eliminating the need for the IRS.

Opponents say the “fair tax” would discourage consumer spending, the biggest driver of the nation’s economy.

And the 9-9-9 plan that Cain envisions preceding it would be no better, critics said.

“The absence of current law’s package of a standard deduction, personal exemptions, child credit, child care credit and the earned-income tax credit means a huge tax hike for the working poor and a substantial tax increase on the labor income of the middle class,” Kleinbard said.

Staff writers Amy Gardner and Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.

[editor-surveyor]

>> “A truly equal tax system, where a tax increase affects everyone, will destroy many of the left’s redistributionist dreams.” <<

.
That is why Margaret Thatcher favored a head tax on working age people.

[Randy Larsen]

It’s about time that the poor worry more about economics other than where the freebies come from.

If they are going to vote, they need some real skin in the game!

[bigbob]

those “experts” wouldn’t be liberals and democrats, would they?

Hey, I know - let’s have the Congressional Budget Office score it! Yeah, that’ll work...

[kevao]

Where is the savings for the millions of people just like me?

It's in the saving of the Republic. You realize what will soon happen unless the trend of the current tax code is stopped cold?

It used to be just 35% who didn't pay any federal income tax. Then 40%, then 45%. Now it's 49%.

Guess what happens when it becomes 51%? That's right, a tyrannical free-loading majority will start winning every single election, and we taxpaying suckers in the minority won't be able to stem the massive growth in federal spending and taxation demanded by the freeloaders.

Ask the retired fixed-income folks in Greece whether they're looking forward to the $hit storm that's heading their way. That's your future under this currently bankrupt tax code.

Under 999, everyone will have to pay some federal income tax. Everyone will have skin in the game. And everyone will think twice about voting for the pol that promises all these great new federal spending programs.

[mylife]

And what about ROTH IRA’s? in which you have paid the tax on the front end?

Now you get nailed again?

[independent in tx]

With all due respect about the poor:

My sister and I were both pushed to achieve economic success. I made it, she became mentally disabled. It’s not aways their fault.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

For starters, about 30 million of the poorest households pay neither income taxes nor Social Security or Medicare levies. “So for them, doing away with the payroll tax doesn’t save anything. And you are adding both a 9 percent sales tax and 9 percent income tax. So we know they will be worse off,” Williams said.

Yes! They might even be forced to look for a job to pay their "fair share".

[LALALAW]

How can anyone be on this forum as a conservative and not understand that a single rule for EVERYBODY is the way to starve the beast, eliminate the power to pick winners and losers and begin to put the Federal Government back in the Constitutional box originally designed for it?

[freeandfreezing]

That makes no flippin' sense.

You are right. Anybody who is working legally is paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, as is their employer. Whoever wrote the article is either clue-free, or is admitting that nobody in the poorest 30 million households works, or rather works legally.

And even the self employed poor should be paying FICA and Medicare at like 15%, although some probably don't.

I think it is wise to have a yearly income limit below which no taxes are due. Otherwise you end up with kids having to file a tax return because they made $200 shoveling snow for the neighbors.

[Responsibility2nd]

Why??

Because you read some liberal clap-trap and believed it?

Or because you like the existing tax code much better?

[Randy Larsen]

That alone would be a hidden benefit for us all.

[ROTB]

“Right now, we have a strongly progressive income tax. High-income people are paying a higher share of income in taxes than lower-income people,”

I thought the rich were getting out of paying taxes. Which is it?

***

I thought the rich didn’t pay their fair share. Now they argue that the rich pay more than the poor. LOL!

***

People like Warren Buffet are investors, and they get their income from dividends, and they are taxed lightly for this at 15%.

People like movie stars, sports stars, and executives are paid salaries, and THEY get slammed by our “progressive” system.

[mylife]

How do you starve the beast by giving it a NEW tax revenue conduit?

[BatGuano]

I like that idea.

[LomanBill]

Fithcal Conthervatism - Herman Cain edition.

 

====================

 

TP: Mr. Cain, you recently came under fire for your comments about the kind of people you would appoint to your cabinet. Would you be opposed to appointing an openly gay but qualified person to be in your cabinet?

CAIN: Nope, not at all. I wouldn’t have  a problem with that at all. I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don’t have  a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they’re not going to try to put sharia law in our laws.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=gsihc&cp=20&gs_id=25&xhr=t&q=Open+homosexual+Cain

=====================

 

HERMAN: What happens now?

Scott Toomey: Well, now, uh, Ken Mehlman, R. Clarke Cooper, Meghan McCain, Mary Cheney and I wait until nightfall, and then leap out of the Fithcally Conthervative log cabin, taking The Party(tm) by surprise -- not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!

HERMAN: Who leaps out?

Scott Toomey: Uh, Ken Mehlman,  R. Clarke Cooper, Meghan McCain, Mary Cheney and I. Uh, leap out of the log cabin, uh and uh....

HERMAN: Oh....

Scott Toomey: Oh.... Um, l-look, if we built this large wooden Rhinocerous -- [twong]

ALL:  Run away!  Run away!  Run away!  Run away!
      [splat]

Cain is a salesman, not a conservative.

[kevao]

Exactly.

Does anyone believe that ObamaCare would have passed had 9-9-9 been the law of the land? There ain’t no “free healthcare” when you have to chip in to the federal coffers just like everyone else.

[mo]

“Right now, we have a strongly progressive income tax. High-income people are paying a higher share of income in taxes...”

This is why we have an oligarchy...

[JLS]

I do not favor his plan without a constitutional amendment, but you have it right. One of the pluses is that so called poor would have “skin in the game.” Many of them do not now.

Of course the Dims will not easily give up a constituency for more government.

[GeronL]

Over the Target

.
.
.

getting flack

....

even though I am not convinced about the 9-9-9 plan, although the 9-9-9 Pizza deal was fabulous (heh) I am backing Herman Cain at this time.

As long as he doesn’t call me “heartless” for disagreeing with him on something.

[Mike Darancette]

tax experts say would mean that low- and middle-income Americans would pay more.

Good, having 47% pay nothing is bad. For the 47% to pay 9% for income and not having any payroll tax is not such a bad trade off.