Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

By almost any measure — social, political, economic, logical — Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is nuts, nuts, nuts. Go ahead and jack up the price of nearly everything that moves in the United States with a 9 percent national sales tax on all new purchases and services. Talk about instant branding: every time you buy something, you’ll be hit with the Herm Cain tax at the checkout line.

And this is just the start. The nearly 50 million filers whose main federal tax is now a payroll deduction and not an income tax would see their overall bill from the government increase by nearly 100 percent. This conclusion comes from the economists and fact-checkers who have actually looked at the napkin sketch of a plan Cain got from some accountant friend of his in Cleveland.

In essence, Cain is proposing the largest shift in tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class in the nation’s history. Oh, and he apparently would scrap the two great government programs that keep millions clinging to fragile middle-class status — Social Security and Medicare — because he wants to eliminate the payroll taxes that now pay for those insurers of dignity.



We are forced to seriously consider this bizarro-world, reverse-Robin-Hood scheme, one that would junk the entire federal tax code for a 9 percent flat rate on corporate earnings, personal income and retail sales, because of the astonishing news that Republicans have elevated Cain to the top of their field in three polls released over the last 48 hours.

Not to worry: fruit flies on a bad apple have a longer life than does a front-runner among Republican presidential candidates. Cain’s reign will be short because his central plan is pure craziness, even for Republicans.

Let’s say you buy a new car or a week’s worth of groceries, or pay $2,000 for your kid’s dental work. Cain would add 9 percent to the price of those transactions — on top of the 9 percent in sales taxes people already pay in some states, like Washington, where I live. And if you’re lower middle class, there would be no income tax offset — but an increase!

That’s the Cain platform: raise the price of everything in the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression.

So how did Cain float to the top, at least for a week? He’s a motivational speaker, and a good one. He’s glib, optimistic, likeable, and has a great personal story. But he has zero governing experience. And his business forte was running a national food chain, Godfather’s, when they made truly awful-tasting pizzas. (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt on their post-Cain pizzas.)

Cain tops the polls because almost three-quarters of Republican primary voters cannot come around to their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. And the rest of the field lose voters every time they open their mouths.

In Tuesday’s debate, Newt Gingrich showed why he is a prevaricator with preternatural talent, finding new and creative ways to revive old and discredited lies. He trotted out the 2009 “lie of the year” winner by Politifact.com — that death panels would decide who gets to live under the new health care law.

He also called for jailing the congressional architects of a new law to curb the kind of uncontrolled manipulations by bankers and Wall Street traders that brought down the global economy. You heard that right: he doesn’t want the people who dreamed up all those explosive credit default swaps and derivative trades to go to jail; he wants to incarcerate the reformers.

Cain’s ideas are actually worse: he would give Wall Street speculators more money. Under his plan, a billionaire now paying only 15 percent federal taxes on investment income — a lower rate, as Warren Buffett notes, than his secretary pays — would get a 40 percent reduction.

Last month’s frontrunner, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, offered up fresh material for the all-hat-no-cattle label he seems determined to wear. To his prior proclamations that evolution is “a theory that’s out there,” and global warming is a hoax, this dream candidate of Rush Limbaugh put the American Revolution in the 16th century. Amazing, the things Thomas Jefferson could do in his 235th year.

Oh, but there were some critics of Cain-o-nomics. Michele Bachmann noted that the 9-9-9 design, turned upside down, was a Satanic 6-6-6.

The power of his plan, Cain replies to all criticism, is its simplicity. “I can explain it in a minute!” he says. But someone who has taken more than a minute with 9-9-9 — Bruce Bartlett, the former economic adviser to Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush — has called it “insane.” Read his examination in his Times blog here.

Cain is unelectable, and his plan is toxic. This gets Republicans back to the one person they cannot yet get their arms around: Willard Mitt Romney, an unflappable technocrat with a Harvard M.B.A. who passed a bold socialist health care plan that is a model for the nation, and once professed that he would be stronger on gay rights than Teddy Kennedy. Bring on the general election.