UPDATE II: 999 Or 666?

Economy, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Taxation

“When you take the 999 plan and turn it upside down (666); the devil’s in the details.”—Michele Bachmann.

Here’s Bachmann’s brilliant quip in it entirety, excerpted from “The Hanover Economic Debate.” [YouTube of the beautiful Minnesota Congresswoman follows.]

BACHMANN: “I would have to say that the 999 plan isn’t a jobs plan, it is a tax plan. And I would say that from my experience being in Congress, but also as a federal tax lawyer, when you — the last thing you would do is give Congress another pipeline of a revenue stream. And this gives Congress a pipeline in a sales tax. A sales tax can also lead to value-added tax. The United States Congress put into place the Spanish-American War tax in 1888. We only partially repealed that in 2006. So once you get a new revenue stream, you are never going to get rid of it.

And one thing I would say is, when you take the 999 plan and you turn it upside down, I think the devil is in the details.”

UPDATE I (Oct. 15): Peter Schiff says 999 offers a substantial reduction in the corporate rate of income tax which is a positive thing (naturally). Schiff also credits Cain with intending to move toward the abolition of tax on income and toward replacing the income tax with some tariff-like national sales tax. So far so good, says Schiff. However, corporations will have to pay a 9 percent tax on profits as well as on their payroll. 999 is a hidden payroll tax. That’s a new thing. And it’s bad, says Schiff.

UPDATE II (Oct. 16): More about the 9-9-9 plan from Bruce Bartlett (whom I once praised for aiming a shot across the bows of Bush’s bastardized “conservatism” before it was allowable).

No mention is made on the site of a tax cut for those now in the 10 percent, 15 percent or 25 percent brackets. This means that the only people who would get a tax rate cut are those now in the 28 percent, 33 percent or 35 percent brackets. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4 percent of taxpayers pay any taxes at those rates.
As for corporations, Mr. Cain’s proposal is primarily going to benefit those with revenues of more than $1 million a year, because they account for 98.7 percent of all receipts by C corporations. (A C corporation is a legal entity separate and distinct from its owners that is taxed as a corporation; its shareholders pay taxes individually on their gains.) Those companies with receipts over $50 million account for 88.8 percent of total receipts.
Other business entities — sole proprietorships, S corporations (which have between 1 and 100 shareholders and pass through net income or losses to shareholders) and partnerships — would not benefit because they are not taxed on the corporate schedule. But they represent 92 percent of all businesses.
Second, Mr. Cain would eliminate all taxes on profits earned by multinational corporations outside the United States. It’s hard to know the impact of this provision, but according to Martin Sullivan, an economist with Tax Analysts, the 50 largest corporations in the United States generated half of their profits in other countries.

Read the rest of Bartlett’s substantive analysis of 999.

UPDATED: Onward to Uganda!

Africa, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, War

I’ve never thought much of the president, as you know. But even I was overly optimistic about Barack Obama’s powers of discernment, having once ventured that in the so-called good war (Afghanistan), Obama had found a war he could call his own. BHO has fewer qualms than Genghis Bush himself about pursuing “wars of the womb” (Libya) and skirmishes for certain select causes (no congressional authority required): that’s the guy’s style.

Now, at the behest of B. Hussein Obama, US troops have joined forces with one Ugandan tribal entity against another, and are hunting for a war lord: Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. (I dilate briefly on this conflict in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”; it’s emblematic of most of the faction fighting that grips Africa.)

BHO, however, believes “that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.”

I had failed to sufficiently appreciate both the depths of Obama’s stupidity and the breadth of his abuse of office.

UPDATE (Feb. 7, 2012): “Obama decision to send troops to Uganda comes under new scrutiny.”

UPDATED: Is A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) The Fall Guy for the AG (Attorney General)? Yes!

Conspiracy, Crime, Iran, Law, Middle East, Propaganda, Terrorism, The State

My latest WND.COM column, “Eric Holder, Gunrunning and a Pair of Iranian Numbskulls,” fleshes out the case that A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) is the fall guy for the AG (attorney general). Here’s an excerpt:

“… If we know anything about the Iranian Special Forces, it is that they are nothing like the schlemiels we’ve just indicted. The two remind me of Chipopo, the hero in a series of Hebrew children’s books I used to devour as a kid in Israel. Chipopo was a monkey. Defendants Mansour and Shakuri’s antics, as detailed in the legal brief that reads like a hastily written potboiler, conjure ‘Chipopo Joins the IDF,’ an adventure in this series. Needless to say, it was not his height that gave the monkey away during basic training.

Enter CS-1.

CS-1 is the chief witness against Holder’s aspiring terrorists, and ‘a paid confidential source,’ who had been ‘previously charged in connection with a narcotics offense by authorities of a certain U.S. state. In exchange for CS-1’s cooperation … the State charges were dismissed.’

Put it this way, allowing CS-1 to conduct a sting operation is a lot like letting a criminally minded attorney general run guns to Mexico’s drug cartels.

Oops. Holder has already done his subversive best to corner that ‘market’ by allegedly authorizing Operation Fast and Furious, in which a gang going by the acronym ATF—the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—sold assault rifles to Mexican gangsters and their local gun-runners, who later used their taxpayer-funded ammunition and immunity to gun down innocent Americans and many more, mostly unmentioned, Mexicans. …

CS-1 met Team Chipopo in Mexico. It’s almost like our sophisticates were tracing the smuggling routes of Operation Fast and Furious.

Or perhaps, these simpletons were simply drawn to the original scene of the crime. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

At this rate, it is not impossible to imagine America’s attorney general funneling arms to odd-balls in Iran using Operation Fast and Furious’ as a fig leaf. …”

Read the complete column, now on WND.

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UPDATE (Oct. 14): This alleged Tehran-directed terror plot was likely hatched in Disneyland (code name for D.C.). But John-bomb McCain is not in the habit of questioning a good cause for American aggression.

Murdered Mexicans

Barack Obama, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Government, GUNS

In my forthcoming, weekly WND column—it talks about how A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) has become the fall guy for the AT (Attorney General)—I mention a neglected aspect of “Operation Fast and Furious,” neglected by its American investigators and the criminal enterprise they are probing (the US government). Writes Ruben Navarrette Jr. on CNN.COM:

But by far, the group that paid the heaviest price for this doomed initiative is the Mexican people. There is no way to know how many Mexicans died at the hands of criminals armed with weapons supplied courtesy of the ATF, but Carlos Canino, an ATF agent at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, reportedly testified to congressional investigators that Fast and Furious guns showed up at nearly 200 crime scenes. This scandal is about dead Mexicans.

MORE.