Herman Cain is an African American who made a small fortune delivering bastardized Italian food to WASPy college stoners – America in a nutshell. His presence in Washington would double the swamp’s allocation of common sense, yet his latest proposal looks pretty foolish. Mr. Cain, please see the light and step back from your 9x9x9 tax proposal.

Mr. Cain, a long time Fair Tax proponent, has recently endorsed a similar idea: abolish the entire tax code and replace it with a 9% tax on individual income, corporate profits, and payrolls. Considering the middle class unknowingly pays a 14% payroll tax, the proposal looks great on paper. Marginal taxes would decreases, and the various deductions by which Washington manipulates the tax code would be wiped away. Doubtlessly, economic growth would explode as the market would be set free to allocate all forms of capital where it would create the most value. The one problem is that Mr. Cain clearly does not understand how Washington works.

When the States ratified the 16^th Amendment in 1913, the initial top income tax bracket was 7%, and only for those making the modern equivalent of $22million. For those earning up to $132,000, the tax was 3%. By 1944, under a militantly anti-capitalist FDR administration, the top bracket rose to 94%. Ever since its introduction, the income tax has been used as a weapon in class warfare. Congress knows that populist strumming of the ‘fair share’ hymn wins elections, and tax deductions are the main currency of graft. As long as there has been an income tax, it has been abused.

Therein lies Mr. Cain’s naiveté, he thinks that the flat 9% income tax elements of his plan will remain. From the beginning of the US’s income tax, it took only three years to double the top bracket. If Cain’s 9x9x9 plan were passed, income tax brackets and corrupting deductions would quickly return to their prior corrupt state, but the sales tax would remain.

The US already has a sales tax, only it is implemented at the state and local level. Taxes range from zero to over 13%, nearly the VAT rates of socialist Europe. Add a Federal tax, and the typical sales tax would easily eclipse European levels. The US left has long sought to emulate Europe in its failures, and giving the Federal Government the final piece to the socialist tax puzzle would lead to disaster.

The Fair Tax usually calls for the Constitutional abolition of the income tax, but not so for the 9x9x9 proposal. Like a wild predator, once Washington gets a taste for the new sales tax, it will stalk and prey upon the US consumer until the US is just another anemic European socialist failure. For the sake of everything in which you profess to believe, Mr. Cain, please stop endorsing a Federal sales tax.

As Shout Bits has mentioned before, billionaires like Warren Buffett perennially entreat Washington to raise their taxes. The fallacy of the ultra-rich’s argument is that the US does not tax most forms of wealth apart from real estate. A ‘Buffett rule,’ as Pres. Obama calls it, is just a higher income tax bracket. For those who have already achieved great wealth, that is a small penalty, but for those who are still working toward success, the tax is a significant barrier. Mr. Buffett’s plan is actually the means to stifle his emerging competition and keep him at the top. If Mr. Buffett really wants the rich to pay more, he should advocate a wealth tax.

A wealth tax is just that, a levy on an individual’s balance sheet. France assesses 1.8% of any wealthy person’s estate each year. Many other European nations do the same, and Spain recently adopted the practice for people whose net worth exceeds about $1 million. If the goal is to punish billionaires, the wealth tax is the way to go.

Obama has conveniently confused people who earn $250,000 per year with private jet owners. Private jets are owned by people whose net worth exceeds $100 million. For these people, $250,000 per year is the interest their checking account would pay. Of course the real fat cats are the billionaire class such as Google’s founders, whose private jet is a Boeing 767.

Rather than assuaging Mr. Buffett’s guilt by taxing people who earn $250,000 per year, he should seek a wealth tax. A 10% wealth tax on net worth above $1 billion would cost Mr. Buffet $4.9 billion each year, and Shout Bits suspects Mr. Buffett would find that bill meets the standard of ‘fair share’ with room to spare. Unfortunately, the US has only about 412 billionaires who would only pay about $260 billion each year while their wealth lasted. As Obama and Buffett surely know, the real tax base in the US is the middle class, and any “revenue enhancement” invariably falls on their backs.

In the unlikely event one of the US’s hypocritical ‘fair share’ billionaires reads this article, relax – it is only a joke. The point is that Obama and Buffett don’t really want to tax the wealthy, rather they want to drain the upper middle class under the cover of making Champaign sippers chip in. Mr. Buffett’s hamburger and Cherry Coke are, in fact, quite safe.