Birther Governor Goodhair has a ‘flat tax’ plan too!

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Arizona Republic today published this bit of lame analysis from the Washingtopn Post, Perry adding heft to team, touts tax plan Welcome to Rick Perry 2.0:

The Perry campaign announced Monday that it has hired several veteran operatives with national campaign experience to augment a team that had been dominated by people who had long work histories with Perry in Texas.

The most notable of the new hires is senior adviser Joe Allbaugh, who was campaign manager for George W. Bush's presidential run in 2000.

The personnel moves came as Perry prepared to give a speech today in South Carolina in which he will announce a proposal for a national flat tax to replace the current income-tax system.

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Perry's embrace of the flat tax could help him win back conservatives who like Cain's proposal to overhaul the tax code and replace it with his "9-9-9" plan, which includes a national sales tax.

"Putting lipstick on a pig" immediately comes to mind. This lame analysis leaves out entirely the fact that "Rick Perry 2.0" went full Donald Trump birtherism over the weekend in an attempt to attract the votes of the crazies. Steve Benen writes at the Political Animal – Stepping on his own ‘reset’:

[T]he Texas governor has a new economic plan, he recently gave a big energy policy speech, he’s hired a team of new advisers, and Perry appears eager to put the recent collapse of his political standing behind him.

But instead of talking about Perry’s comeback strategy, the governor is stepping all over his own message by peddling “Birther” nonsense — again.

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Talking to CNBC’s John Harwood, Perry followed up on his questions about President Obama’s birthplace published in Parade over the weekend, rehashing the issue all over again. Perry told Harwood he’s “not worried” about the president’s birth certificate, but he nevertheless kept talking about it and Obama’s college transcript. “It’s fun,” Perry said, “to poke at him a little bit and say ‘Hey, how about let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’”

Harwood gave Perry a chance to say he was kidding about all of this, but the governor wants to play both sides here — he’s calling it a “distractive” issue, while deliberately signaling to the right-wing conspiracy theorists that he’s sympathetic to their silliness.

Indeed, Perry said plainly that this is “a good issue to keep alive.”

In other words, there’s an actual strategy here. Perry wants the conspiracy theory to get some additional attention. Instead of having the political world spend the day talking about his economic agenda, he’s inviting observers to keep the Birther nonsense in mind instead.

This makes Perry look like a fool to sensible people everywhere, but all things considered, maybe he doesn’t mind — any serious look at Perry’s tax plan arguably makes him look even worse.

Well, le'ts look at the nonsense of Governor Goodhair's "flat tax" plan today. Political Animal – Rick Perry has a tax plan:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry, desperate to get his flailing campaign back on track, has a new idea. He calls it “Cut, Balance and Grow” (not to be confused with “Cut, Cap, and Balance”), and presents his pitch in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning.

While Perry’s plan has some fairly dramatic flaws — it’s a comical right-wing fantasy, built on numbers that don’t add up — I’ll at least give him credit for thinking big. Some candidates would be content unveiling a ridiculous flat-tax proposal, but the Texas governor is pushing a ridiculous flat-tax proposal and a ridiculous plan for partial privatization of Social Security and a ridiculous effort to eliminate the Estate Tax and reducing the capital-gains tax to 0%.

But wait, there’s more!

Perry also intends to repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act and remove safeguards from the financial industry and amend the U.S. Constitution to require balanced budgets and impose draconian caps on all federal spending.

How would Perry pay for all of these massive tax cuts? He doesn’t say. But don’t worry, the governor believes he can do all of this while also balancing the budget.

Is anyone really supposed to take this nonsense seriously?

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[Perry] chatted with John Harwood about his plan, in an interview that aired this morning on CNBC. When Harwood noted that the plan looks like a massive giveaway to the rich, Perry replied, “I don’t care. I care about them having money to invest.”

In other words, Perry isn’t pretending about his intentions. The goal here is to identify those who already have the most money — and who are already getting richer all the time, consolidating an ever-growing percentage of the nation’s wealth — and shower these fortunate few with even more expansive tax breaks so they’ll have even more riches. Perry will try to pay for some of this by, of course, gutting measures that benefit working families.

This isn’t a tax policy. It’s a bad comedy.

Martin Bashir on MSNBC had the best line today. He said he'd "compare Rick Perry to Forrest Gump, but that would not be fair to Forrest Gump. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo asks the obvious question:

A Flat Tax and Privatized Social Security are fast becoming the new litmus test of the 2012 Republican campaign.

How long till Mitt submits?

"Mittens" Romney opposed Steve Forbes' flat tax in 1996, when he called it a "tax cut for fat cats." He even opposed it during the 2007 campaign when he called it unfair. But this shapeshifter has been testing the GOP primary electorate to see whether he should flip-flop on this issue as well. Daily Kos: Romney sets stage for flat tax flip-flop. Oh, you know it's coming.