Flavor of the month Herman Cain

Herman Cain unwittingly takes lie detector test and PASSES… after private investigator examines his speech with $15,000 software

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2060174/Herman-Cain-PASSES-lie-detector-test-sexual-harassment-claims.html

Remember when the Chris Matthews crowd painted the Tea Party with their ideological tar brush of racism? Support for Herman Cain proves they were bigoted fools – hypocrites.

Herman Cain, the MSNBC flavor of the month.

His presidential bid was meant to be a lark, likely a gambit to increase speaking fees and book sales, perhaps to gain him a gig on cable news. At first, he was in on the joke, gaming the primary process and making up policies as he went along….

It was, at its very core, a preposterous premise: That a man who, as the former head of a big Washington trade group, was at the very heart of this town’s lobbying culture, would run a campaign as the ultimate political outsider. He would claim that running for president “didn’t start as a consideration until after President Obama took office” – even though Cain ran for president once before, in 2000.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-herman-cain-crack-up/2011/11/02/gIQAfyuAgM_story.html

He’s on a book tour!

Additional perspective:

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cains-experience-as-restaurant-group-chief-mirrors-some-of-his-campaigns-problems/2011/11/03/gIQAxsQvjM_story.html

“He opposes abortion, including in cases of rape and incest. He thinks Iran could be deterred from aggression by deploying more warships. And he is a proponent of privatized Social Security.

But just one topic — his ’9-9-9′ tax plan — has dominated Herman Cain’s rhetoric in this presidential race, helping to propel him to the top of Republican polls this month.”

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cains-style-simple-solutions-and-a-willingness-to-say-i-dont-know/2011/10/13/gIQAxA3UiL_story.html

When he wasn’t fighting to deny pay raises and health insurance to the working poor, Cain was also busy serving on corporate boards, including Aquilar. Aquilar was once a sleepy electric-power company that, while Cain was on the board, followed Enron into the wholesale energy-trading business. Like Enron, it got nailed for trying to manipulate trading in natural gas and paid a fine of $26.5 million. Curiously, Cain never mentions his experience at Aquilar when demanding repeal of those onerous post-Enron regulations that require directors to adopt better systems for internal control.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hermanomics-let-them-eat-pizza/2011/10/11/gIQAgTOmmL_story_1.html

Lest we forget: Cain is Howard Dean…

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ana-marie-cox-blog/2011/oct/13/herman-cain-nonviable-frontrunner

Reveling in the national spotlight, Cain is pledging to bolster his fledgling White House campaign.

He’ll need to — and quickly — if he has any hope of winning the Republican nomination. The unlikely presidential contender has little campaign organization in Iowa, New Hampshire and other states where voting begins in less than three months. And he hasn’t done much else in those places to capitalize on his surge.

“We are now going to ramp up,” Cain promised.

It takes money and organization to win the presidency, and so far, Cain trails his top GOP rivals on both fronts.

Earlier this year, Cain had to lend his campaign $500,000 to stay afloat. He’ll report his fundraising for the past three months within days. He is suggesting that money no longer will be a problem and says he has enough to expand his campaign.

www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2011/10/14/cain-focuses-on-faith-in-circleville-speech.html

DennisPaden writes:
in response to JJF:
Bio on Herman Cain:
* Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.
* Master’s degree in Computer Science.
* Mathematician for the Navy, where he worked on missile ballistics
(making him a rocket scientist).
* Computer systems analyst for Coca-Cola.
* VP of Corporate Data Systems and Services for Pillsbury (this is the
top of the ladder in the computer world, being in charge of information systems for a major corporation).
All achieved before reaching the age of 35.
* Business Manager. Took charge of Pillsbury’s 400 Burger King
restaurants in the Philadelphia area, which were the company’s poorest performers in the country. Spent the first nine months learning the business from the ground up, cooking hamburger and yes, cleaning toilets. After three years he had turned them into the company’s best performers.
* Godfather’s Pizza CEO. Was asked by Pillsbury to take charge of
their Godfather’s Pizza chain (which was on the verge of bankruptcy). He made it profitable in 14 months.
* In 1988 he led a buyout of the Godfather’s Pizza chain from
Pillsbury. He was now the owner of a restaurant chain. Again he reached the top of the ladder of another industry.
* He was also chairman of the National Restaurant Association during
this time. This is a group that interacts with government on behalf of the restaurant industry, and it gave him political experience from the non-politician side.
* Adviser to the Federal Reserve System. Herman Cain went to work for
the Federal Reserve Banking System advising them on how monetary policy changes would affect American businesses.
* Chairman of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. He worked his way
up to the chairmanship of a regional Federal Reserve bank. This is only one step below the chairmanship of the entire Federal Reserve System (the top banking position in the country). This position allowed him to see how monetary policy is made from the inside, and understand the political forces that impact the monetary system.
After reaching the top of the banking industry, he changed careers for a fourth time!
* Writer and public speaker. He then started to write and speak on
leadership. His books include Speak as a Leader, CEO of Self, Leadership is Common Sense, and They Think You’re Stupid.
* Radio Host. Around 2007, after a remarkable 40 year career, he
started hosting a radio show on WSB in Atlanta (the largest talk radio station in the country).
He did all this starting from rock bottom (his father was a chauffeur and his mother was a maid). When you add up his accomplishments in his life, including reaching the top of three unrelated industries: information systems, business management, and banking, Herman Cain may have the most impressive resume of anyone that has run for the presidency in the last half century.
Thanks for the post. A wonderful story! A great American An -up-by-his-boot-straps sort of guy. I enjoy listening to him speak.
His 9-9-9 idea is terrible. Still not voting for him.

www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/oct/13/candidate-to-revisit-local-roots/

October 13, 2011, 8:30 PM

Cold Pizza from Herm Cain
By TIMOTHY EGAN

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.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/cold-pizza-from-herm-cain/

Cain’s 9-9-9 Arithmetic Raises Revenue Generation Questions
By Steven Sloan – Oct 5, 2011 10:59 AM ET

Herman Cain’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination is fueled in part by his proposed U.S. tax code overhaul that tax policy veterans say doesn’t add up.

His proposal is gaining attention after a Washington Post- ABC News poll released yesterday found that Cain is tied for second place with Texas Governor Rick Perry among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. A Quinnipiac University poll published today has Cain in second place and Perry in third.

In campaign stops, Cain touts his 9-9-9 plan as a concept that will lead to a fairer tax system. The proposal would tax sales transactions and gross income for individuals and businesses at 9 percent while eliminating levies on capital gains. It also ends the taxes that fund Social Security, and corporations wouldn’t pay a tax on dividends.

Following the broad contours of Cain’s plan, the U.S. would have collected almost $2 trillion in 2010, according to a Bloomberg News calculation based on data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The U.S. actually collected almost $2.2 trillion that year, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Unrealistic Proposal

Tax policy experts say Cain’s plan is unrealistic because it presumes that no deductions and exemptions will be permitted, no matter how popular.

“Either Herman Cain is the tax messiah or is proposing a system that has no correspondence to real-world tax systems,” said Edward Kleinbard, a former chief of staff to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “In practice, it will have the same economic effect as a 27 percent uncapped payroll tax.”

Kleinbard is now a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.

Speaking on radio host Don Imus’s program yesterday, Cain said the 9-9-9 proposal would be revenue-neutral, meaning it would generate as much revenue as the U.S. collects now.

“We calculated based upon initially no growth, just replicate the amount of revenue we’re already bringing in,” he said.

Cain’s campaign hasn’t produced specific revenue estimates for its proposal and didn’t respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Estimated Collections

Using 2010 figures, Cain’s plan would have collected $922.1 billion in revenue from the national sales tax with no exemptions, $912.7 billion at a 9 percent individual income tax with few deductions or other tax benefits, and $127.7 billion from a 9 percent tax on U.S. corporate income with no deductions.

The federal government in 2010 actually collected $898.5 billion from individuals, including levies on capital gains; $191.4 billion from the corporate income tax; $864.8 billion from Social Security and retirement taxes; $141 billion in other taxes, such as estate and gift taxes; and $66 billion in excise taxes. This doesn’t include the taxes levied by states on retail sales and property.

Cain’s proposal is worded in a way that suggests nothing — food, housing or clothing — would be exempt from the national sales tax. It is unlikely that Congress would endorse such a broad-based consumption tax, and even if it did, consumers might change their buying habits. That could reduce consumption and would then lower revenue from the national sales tax.

Lower Revenue

If lawmakers were to exempt everyday items such as food and clothing and provide a rebate to low-income individuals to offset the regressive nature of the sales tax, the plan would generate much less revenue, said David Kautter, managing director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University in Washington. With the information available, it’s almost impossible to develop a precise revenue estimate, he said.

“The revenue estimate is largely dependent on the rate and what’s subject to tax,” Kautter said. “When you pull out housing, clothing and food, the amount you raise drops by a lot.”

Cain, 65, has signaled resistance to exemptions from the sales tax. In an Oct. 2 appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” he said his goal is to “grow the base and make sure the tax code is fairer for everybody.”

“It levels the playing field,” he said. “It gets rid of all the loopholes. But the most interesting is, it gets the government out of the business of trying to pick winners and losers and trying to decide what’s regressive and what’s not regressive.”

‘Informal Sale’

Daniel Shaviro, a professor of taxation at the New York University School of Law, said a national sales tax is difficult to implement because it is easily evaded.

“All the consumer and I have to do is turn off the register and do an informal sale,” he said.
Cain’s proposal is notable for its lack of deductions and benefits compared with the current tax code. Business deductions would be limited to investments, purchases from other companies and dividends paid to shareholders. Individuals could deduct charitable deductions. Businesses and individuals in so-called empowerment zones could qualify for additional deductions.

Turnaround Manager

Cain is pitching himself as a turnaround manager who saved Godfather’s Pizza Inc., a restaurant chain, from bankruptcy. An Atlanta native, he was on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in the 1990s and was its chairman from 1995 to 1996.

He won Florida’s Republican presidential straw poll on Sept. 24 with 37.1 percent of the votes. Perry was second with 15.4 percent.

There are plenty of questions remaining about the details of Cain’s proposals. Chris Edwards, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington organization that advocates for limited government, said some of the business provisions were “odd.”

The shift to taxing gross income instead of net income would mean that some business expenses, such as wages, could no longer be deducted, Edwards said. He questioned the benefit of such a move when Cain’s plan would also protect businesses from paying taxes on dividends.

“The business base would be much broader because businesses don’t get a wage deduction, but then it would be narrower because they get to deduct dividends paid to shareholders,” Edwards said. “That’s a significantly different base.”

Shifting Tax Burden

Kleinbard said the bottom-line effect of Cain’s proposal would be a greater shift of the tax burden to individuals from corporations and investors. He said eliminating the deductibility of wages would raise the cost of labor, which businesses would pass on to workers in the form of lower pay.

That, combined with no mention of the standard deduction, personal exemption or earned-income tax credit, “means a huge tax hike for the working poor,” he said.

There’s a long way to go before any of that happens, said Joseph Thorndike, an editor at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan publisher in Falls Church, Virginia.

“I do not believe they made a serious effort to estimate the revenue from these plans, but most other candidates’ plans aren’t any different,” he said. “They spout out all kinds of stuff.

www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/cain-s-9-9-9-math-raises-questions-on-generating-enough-revenue.html

Flavor of the month Herman Cain