Posted on 10/23/2011 4:57:25 PM PDT by JOHN W K
In November of 2010 in Don’t be VAT stupid Herman Cain writes:
``A national retail sales tax on top of all the confusing and unfair taxes we have today is insane! It gives the out-of-control bureaucrats and politicians in denial one more tool to lie, deceive, manipulate and destroy this country.``
The fact is, Herman is now proposing a new tax, a national retail sales tax, in addition to taxing corporate profits and incomes, and also would tax the wages working people earn. Herman Cain essentially admitted in the above mentioned article his existing plan is ``insane!`` So, why do so many “conservatives” support this Washington Establishment Hobson’s Choice candidate whose mission is to give another taxing power to Congress with which to ``lie, deceive, manipulate and destroy this country``?
And why is it that our ``conservative`` talk show hosts give this former federal reserve bank chairman, a Washington Establishment insider, a pass on his ``opportunity zones`` which attack our free market system? Why do they not object to Mr. Cain proposing to give preferential treatment under law that would relieve residents living in his designated “opportunity zones” a duty to contribute an equal tax burden as those not within his designated zones? Is this proposed preference of commerce not in defiance of our founder’s intentions when they added the following words to our Constitution? “No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear or pay Duties in another.”
Why is it that our “conservative” talk show hosts are silent in connection with Herman Cain’s proposed assumption of power to enter the various united States to enforce unequal law and meddle in each State’s internal commerce when such activity defies the very words of our founder‘s intentions which are summarized as follows? “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.
The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State”.
Has FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Schnitt, Mark Levin, Dennis Prager, Bill O'rielly, Mike Gallagher, Lee Rodgers, Neal Boortz, Doc Thompson, Tammy Bruce, Monica Crowley, or any talk show questioned Herman Cain’s proposed assumption of powers which is very similar to that of Obama’s Solyndra type “green deals” which were hatched to plunder the American Taxpayer’s federal treasury and loot it of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS?
And why is it than none of the above “conservative” media personalities are concerned that a power to “designate” geographical areas within each of the various united States to be an “opportunity zone” invites political partisanship of the most dangerous kind in that a democrat president, as exhibited by the Obama Administration, will use such power to reward friends and punish political enemies? I thought Rush Limbaugh was the fountain of all political knowledge and would see through this Washington Establishment’s cooked up scheme to enlarge its blackmailing powers over the States [e.g., federal highway funds and the Establishment’s No Child Left Behind Act] and further enslave the defenders of a free market system. And these complaints do not even take into account how Herman Cain’s proposal feeds the class warfare game which our folks in Washington have learned to play to perfection with their good-cop bad-cop routine which is engaged in by the leadership of both political parties, and done so in concert!
And finally, where is Mark Levin who continually informs us of the virtues of federalism who seems to have closed his eyes to a wolf in sheep’s clothing whose mission is admittedly designed to further erode the defined and limited powers of our federal government as summarized by our very own Supreme Court shortly after our Constitution’s Tenth Amendment was adopted to preserve and protect the virtues of federalism?
“The government of the United States is of the latter description. The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing; if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.
Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.
If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.
Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently the theory of every such government must be, that an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void.” ____ MARBURY v. MADISON, 5 U.S. 137 (1803)
JWK
"The Constitution is the act of the people, speaking in their original character, and defining the permanent conditions of the social alliance; and there can be no doubt on the point with us, that every act of the legislative power contrary to the true intent and meaning of the Constitution, is absolutely null and void. ___ Chancellor James Kent, in his Commentaries on American Law, 1858.
Hey John...GO AWAY!!
I agree. A sales tax is at the point of sales only.
A national sales tax is not going to pass Congress.
Isn’t that already happening, though, with the supposed “exemption for the poor”? Obviously that only affects the income tax, but I still see seeds of the possibility of class warfare through taxation there.
Also, given recent history, what (aside from elections or outright bankruptcy) is to prevent Congress from just spending $2 trillion or more rather than raising taxes?
Oh well, as long as Congress exists, I guess we’ll have to accept some risk!
I hate to be snippy, but you are simply factually ignorant in every post you’ve made in this thread. Cain gets rid of a 70 thousand word code in his 999 plan and replaces it with a simple flat income tax piece.
Exactly! Herman Cain keep alive Congress' power to lay and collect taxes calculated from profits, gains, and other "incomes".
The only way to drive a stake in the heart of this wretched tax is adding words to our Constitution such as:
The Sixteenth Amendment is hereby repealed and Congress is henceforth forbidden to lay ``any`` tax or burden calculated from profits, gains, interest, salaries, wages, tips, inheritances or any other lawfully realized money
JWK
No, I’m not content to stick with the status quo, which is why I want the entire system thrown out and the EXTREMELY simple 9-9-9 plan implemented.
You’re talking a Constitution Convention with a new amendment passed to completely repeal the existing tax structure. 9-9-9 falls under enough fire b/c some people don’t think it’s revenue neutral. Your idea is DEFINITELY not revenue neutral, so how do you expect to sell it?
Think what you will of a national sales tax, but it's not "another" or even a new power. You pay a national sales tax every time you buy a gallon of gasoline or a tire (just to name two). The federal government has imposed excise taxes on goods and services for virtually our entire history.
There is a vast difference between an excise tax being placed upon “judiciously selected” articles of consumption as our founding fathers intended from that of an national retail sales tax which violates the very intentions of our founding fathers for any general tax laid among the States, and which they specifically intended to be laid by the rule of apportionment.
JWK
“The proportion of taxes are fixed by the number of inhabitants, and not regulated by the extent of the territory, or fertility of soil” 3 Elliot`s, 243, “Each state will know, from its population, its proportion of any general tax” ___ Mr. George Nicholas, during the ratification debates of our Constitution.
He is STILL a hypocrit.
And a pathetic charlatan.
From Business Insider‘s Zeke Miller:
Newly-minted GOP front-runner Herman Cain is best known for his 9-9-9 tax plan, but it turns out he opposed a key component of it — a national sales tax — less than a year ago.
In a column posted on the websites of a number of conservative publications, including The Daily Caller, Cain wrote that “the worst idea is a proposed national sales tax, which is a disguised VAT (value added tax) on top of everything we already pay in federal taxes.”
Miller goes on to publish responses from the Cain campaign that indicate the candidate’s consistent support for “fair/flat” taxes, and that he was referencing a national sales tax in addition to our current tax code, but he needn’t have gone to the trouble. Cain was anchovy-and-onion explicit about that in the very same op-ed piece, including the portion that Miller blockquoted: (emphasis mine)
The worst idea is a proposed national sales tax, which is a disguised VAT (value added tax) on top of everything we already pay in federal taxes.
…A national retail sales tax on top of all the confusing and unfair taxes we have today is insane!
…The third reason the national retail sales tax on top of all the taxes we already pay is a bad idea, is that there is already proposed legislation that replaces all of the federal taxes we pay. It replaces all current revenue. It supercharges our national economic growth, and puts the power of taxation back into the hands of the people who spend their money.
It’s called the Fair Tax. It’s as easy to understand as ABC!
Miller is correct in pointing out that one of the arguments that Cain used against the VAT, that it gives the government a brand-new slippery slope of tax revenue, is currently being deployed by his opponents.
There are, of course, huge problems with the 9-9-9 plan (it strongly resembles a tax plan from a videogame, it’s the work of dyslexic Satan, it shifts the tax burden onto the poor, it encourages the purchase of used milk), and it has as much chance of passing Congress as a monetary system based on unicorn farts, but it isn’t contradicted by Cain’s op-ed from November.
Only time will tell how Herman Cain stands up under the glare of the frontrunner’s spotlight, and there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of the candidate’s steady stream of wild-and-crazy policy pronouncements (although I must confess that my own comically liberal reaction to Cain’s electrified border fence remarks was to think to myself, “Shouldn’t that ‘THIS WILL KILL YOU’ sign be bilingual?”). There’s no reason to create them out of thin air.
How could I possibly be misleading by quoting word for word Herman Cain?
(Herman Cain: T*H*E New Voice Nov 21, 2010)
http://www.economicfreedomcoalition.com/news/press-opinion.asp?id=32
“Giving the administration and Congress another tool to tax us and confuse us is like giving an alcoholic a key to the liquor store with no supervision, only to discover that he locks the door after he is safely inside.
A national retail sales tax on top of all the confusing and unfair taxes we have today is insane! It gives the out-of-control bureaucrats and politicians in denial one more tool to lie, deceive, manipulate and destroy this country.”
Oh that crazy constitution.
I don’t think Cain even gives it a second thought.
A national retail sales tax on top of all the confusing and unfair taxes we have today is insane!
Of course it is. That's why Cain is proposing not to put a National Sales Tax on top of all the confusing and unfair taxes we have today but to eliminate all of the confusing and unfair taxes we have today and replace all of them with a simple 999 tax. Is that so hard to understand?
Last time I checked Herman Cain’s plan, and he does change it from day to day, he is promoting a national retail sales tax, in addition to taxing corporate profits and gains, and also proposes to tax the wages which working people earn, except for those who live in one of his privileged “opportunity zones”.
How sweet of Herman Cain to be so “progressive”!
JWK
Try actually READING what Cain said, not just put your own emotion based spin on it. 9-9-9 replaces, it does not add to, the existing tax code.
Wrong! Herman Cain proposes to keep taxes on corporate profits and gain alive, keep taxes on “incomes” alive which includes taxes on the wages working people earn, and on top of all this he proposes a new tax, a national retail sales tax which would tax the food a mother buys to feed her child, taxes the clothing she purchases to cloth that child, taxes the fuel used to heat that child’s room during winter months, taxes the medicine a mother needs to care for a sickly child, and then our beloved Herman Cain would tax the coffin used to bury her child because she simply could not afford his national sales tax on every imaginable necessity of life in addition to Mr. Cain taxing the bread she earns when selling the property she has in her labor! Of course, if she lives in one of Herman Cain’s privileged “opportunity zones”, she gets a free ride!
JWK
Perhaps in the future you might try actually reading what Cain wrote BEFORE posting a completely ignorant tirade about it.
“...taxes the medicine a mother needs to care for a sickly child, and then our beloved Herman Cain would tax the coffin used to bury her child because she simply could not afford his national sales tax on every imaginable necessity of life...”
I’m picturing Herman Cain twirling his mustache whilst tying the poor woman’s older daughter to the railroad tracks!
Woo-hoo! I can hardly wait til the next installment.
What so many detractors of Cain's plan fail to realize, is that it's politically impossible for Congress to raise a tax rate that affects EVERYONE.
Are you talking about something like the “Temporary Victory Tax” of 1942 levied upon individual’s net incomes to fund the war effort, and is still very much in effect to this very day? As I recall it started off with something like a 2 or 3 percent rate.
As to the sales tax which you seem to favor, it is self evident that such a tax is the darling of depots and political schemers who dream of a tax which may constantly be increased in such small increments, say a quarter of a percent at a time “to feed the starving children” which would avoid significant outcry, that the proverbial frog [the American Taxpayer} will eventually be cooked before attempting its escape.
JWK
No, I'm talking about a tax which is levied against every income earning American, at precisely the same percentage. You can't prove to me that any modern day congress has the courage to raise the rate on such a tax.
As to the sales tax which you seem to favor, it is self evident that such a tax is the darling of depots and political schemers who dream of a tax which may constantly be increased in such small increments
What despots fund their government through a consumption tax (not a VAT)?
Again, as with the case of the flat 9% income tax, a consumption tax would also be politically impossible to touch, because it affects EVERYONE, equally. That is a level of transparency that's been purposely engineered out of our current tax law.
Our current tax regime is the stuff of demons and despots. It's been constantly tinkered with, to the detriment of the productive class in this country. Fix your weapon on the real enemy, friend.
Sorry you worked so hard to write this BS, but you need to re-evaluate your position.
By the way, if you go to the US Government Printing Office ( www.gpo.gov ), you can order a complete set of Title 26 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (that's the part written by the IRS), all twenty volumes of it, at the bargain price of $974, shipping included.
According to the US Government Printing Office, it's 13,458 pages in total. The full text of Title 26 of the United States Code (the part written by Congress—available for an additional $179) is a mere 3,387 printed pages, bringing the adjusted gross page count to 16,845.
The number of words has been left as an exercise for the student.
He is STILL a hypocrit.
And a pathetic charlatan.
From Business Insider‘s Zeke Miller:
Agreed!
The truth is, when it comes to taxes Herman Cain is all over the map and keeps changing his crap. See Don’t be VAT stupid in which he decries a national sales tax. Then, when time passes, he comes out in favor of the “fairtax”. But when he sees too many people objecting to putting every American family on a monthly government subsistence check under its family consumption entitlement, and that the fairtax must be put into operation before the 16th Amendment will be repealed [which the people aren’t buying], then Cain comes up with some new crap, the 9-9-9 plan, and goes back to a national sales tax along with Empowerment Zones, which allows people within his geographical “designated empowerment zones” to be relieved from the 9-9-9 taxes. And then, he changes his “empowerment zones” to “opportunity zones“ for public relations purposes. But the bottom line is, what part of our Constitution is it that Herman Cain believes allows preferential tax treatment based on geographical location. I know Obama believes in preferential treatment as practiced under his Solyndra green jobs deal which he used to plunder our federal treasury. Seem as though Cain and Obama have something very much in common when it comes to using the force of the federal government to grant preferential treatment and unequal tax law.
JWK
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.