Beating Three Nines With A Hand Full Of Jokers

Not to be outdone by Herman Cain's awful 9-9-9 plan, Rick Perry shuffles the deck and draws an even more regressive mess of a tax scheme to transfer wealth to the top.  K-Drum takes a look at Perry's cards.

The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate. The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents....My plan also abolishes the death tax once and for all, providing needed certainty to American family farms and small businesses....To help older Americans, we will eliminate the tax on Social Security benefits....We will eliminate the tax on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains to free up the billions of dollars Americans are sitting on to avoid taxes on the gain.

It's a "flat tax" that keeps many of the same deductions that the flat tax is supposed to get rid of.  Perry can't even get that part right, it seems.  The choice of the old tax code or the new one is of course a terrible idea, assuring massive tax breaks for the rich and nothing for the poor.  It's a propaganda tool.

What can you even say about this? It sounds less like a tax plan than a big ol' stew pot of right-wing applause lines, all the way up to the inane insistence that eliminating the estate tax has nothing to do with rich people and is only designed to provide "needed certainty to American family farms and small businesses." Should we laugh or cry? Perry has actually managed to combine two separate conservative memes (the estate tax is all about family farms, uncertainty is hobbling the economy) into one single sentence that makes even less sense than either of them separately. It's hard not to be impressed.

Although the choice part will assure that if "you dumb broke liberals want to raise taxes dur hurr" why we can take Perry's Hobson's choice and pay more!  It gets Perry back in the game for a few more weeks heading into the end of the year and of course assures Romney will have his own awful "flat tax plan" soon, which is the real point of the measure.

Either way, the 1% wins by stacking the deck.