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Republican tax plans

Rick Perry has come out with this tax plan and Matt Yglesias points out that its just a little better than Herman Cain's.

This is a more modest regressive tax shift than the one implied by Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, but it’s exactly the same in its scope and direction. One of the interesting things about today’s GOP presidential campaign is the extent to which it reveals a total lack of policy disagreement about this. The different candidates’ ideas are all variants on the idea that what America needs is not just lower levels of taxation, but a specific focus on taxing rich people less. What you hear very little about is a theoretical explanation of why this addresses the unmistakeable economic disappointments of the past ten years. Did we not try this? Did Bush’s tax cuts not deliver enough “certainty?”

Cain wants to raise everyone's taxes except for the rich, who would get massive reductions. Perry wants to do the same, just on a smaller scale. Obviously they don't go around saying these things. So it seems like they are either completely unaware of what their plans actually entail or they are relying on people being ignorant.

Though I guess its possible that they just don't care. It could be possible that conservatives are actually convinced they will be rich in the near future and thus they will benefit directly from the massive tax cuts the rich will get under these plans. They could also be convinced that poor people are just lazy morons who should be paying more despite not having much money to begin with. Who knows at this point?

Regardless of how much crazy shit conservatives actually believe, I still think its risky to propose even more regressive tax cuts than Bush did. As the Occupy Wall Street protests have shown, people are starting to get fed up with vast inequality. And while many of those people might be liberals and libertarians, even some conservatives will get mad if President Romney doesn't help improve their economic outlook, all the while giving the rich every advantage they can. I guess as long as conservatives remain delusional these types of tax plans will keep getting proposed.

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