Herman Cain believes so strongly in his tax plan that he wants an new constitutional requirement to ever change it.

GOP presidential primary candidate Herman Cain recently released his “999 Plan,” which would immediately install business, individual, and sales flat taxes of 9 percent, while the country transitions to a “Fair Tax,” or a single national sales tax

At a recent event with Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC) that was posted on YouTube by one of Scott’s campaign accounts, Cain elaborated on his tax plan and revealed another mechanism by which he plans to keep it in place.

Responding to an audience question about how he would ensure that Congress wouldn’t change his plan once it was enacted, Cain said that he is going to ask Scott and other congressional sponsors of the plan to put in a requirement that would only allow it to be changed with a two-thirds vote of the United States Senate:

CAIN: I’m gonna ask Congressman Scott and the other sponsors of the bill to put in the requirement that you have to two-thirds vote in the United States Senate before you can change the 999 Plan. Two-thirds supermajority before you can make a change. What that does is that the American people are gonna know about it because it’s going to require a two-thirds vote.

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Currently, there are only a handful of votes that need two-thirds of the Senate in order to pass, such as approving treaties, overriding a presidential veto, amending the Constitution, or removing a president. Requiring a two-thirds vote to change a particular law without a constitutional amendment would likely be unconstitutional.

Additionally, one state that has such two-thirds requirement for raising taxes — California — has faced major budgetary problems thanks to the hurdles that the requirement places in the way of raising revenues. It hardly seems like a desirable model.

During a Republican presidential primary debate back in August, all of the candidates on stage raised their hand to indicate that they would reject a budget deal that included 10 dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in new government revenue. According to Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels (IN) — who was courted to run for the GOP presidential nomination — if he had been on that stage, he would have been the only one to give a 10 to 1 budget deal a longer look:

DANIELS: I thought it was the single best question anybody’s asked so far. Perfectly fair question. I would not have raised my hand. Now, I would have instantly been called on to explain that. You know, there’s no penalty for piling on in these things. So I’m sure that would have happened, but here’s what I would have said. I wish somebody would have said this.

I would have said, not that I’ll take the deal but tell me more. [...] If somebody’s got an approach that generates greater revenues, there’s a reasonable chance that it encourages private-sector growth — and I think that’s possible — I think it’s a mistake to close the door.

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Daniels has — relative to today’s GOP — tended towards some level of tax sanity, telling Newsweek, “at some stage there could well be a tax increase. They say we can’t have grown-up conversations anymore. I think we can.”

But he hasn’t completely isolated himself from some of the extreme views of his party’s presidential contenders. For instance, in his newly-released book, he largely agrees with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (though he has since tried to walk that back, telling National Public Radio that he won’t use the term again).

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

Wall Street is planning to lay off thousands of workers in a supposedly underperforming quarter, and Goldman Sachs is no exception, saying that it plans to cut $1.2 billion in costs by laying off 1,000 people, roughly 3 percent of its workforce. The mega-bank is also going after small savings by downsizing its drinking cups.

Even plants aren’t safe from the bank’s tightened budget. The London office removed potted plants, reportedly causing “disquiet” among employees and led “to a stand-off between the plant pickers and staff.” Morgan Stanley has also cut back on office foliage, while Bank of America skipped an annual field day.

However, the real measure of whether Wall Street is serious about cutting costs will be if bonuses go down during lean times. And so far, the chances do not look good. The New York Times’ Dealbook reports that banks, including Goldman, have set aside $65.69 billion for bonuses at the end year, an 8 percent increase over last year:

Wall Street executives are also preparing their staffs for smaller year-end bonuses, although the change is not yet reflected in the expenses. During the first six months of the year Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America set aside $65.69 billion to cover compensation and benefits, up 8 percent from a year ago, according to data provided by Nomura. But financial firms tend to wait until the fourth quarter to make the call on the annual payouts.

Unless Goldman and other banks follow up a tough season by handing out smaller bonuses later this year, its cost-saving initaitves are only superficial. A group of shareholders challenged the Goldman board of directors for showing “scant regard” for their interests, having handed out billions in bonuses the same year it received federal aid. Goldman won a dismissal of the case yesterday.

The bonuses may have been a part of “God’s work,” which Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed to be doing in 2009, but if Goldman practiced the same austerity toward bonuses that it did toward office plants, it could afford to keep both its employees and its 12 ounce cups.

– Rebecca Leber

Several of the GOP’s presidential contenders have called for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, with candidates such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Newt Gingrich lamenting that the law is “killing the banking industry” (even as banks pull in record profits). The deregulatory zeal that has gripped the GOP has led to many tortured explanations for how the 2008 financial crisis occurred that don’t implicate Wall Street.

Former GOP Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) was the latest to hop on this train last night, telling MSNBC’s Ed Schultz that is was “government regulation” — spurred by government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — that caused the financial crisis. “It wasn’t deregulation,” he said:

SANTORUM: We had record low rates of unemployment for quite some time in this country until we had the catastrophe that was caused, in large part, by the housing industry and Fannie and Freddie.

SCHULTZ: Which was deregulation. Which is what the Republicans push a lot of.

SANTORUM: No, it wasn’t deregulation. No, no, no, it wasn’t deregulation at all. It was Fannie and Freddie holding all of these assets they shouldn’t have been holding, that we actually needed to have less being held by these folks. [...] Part of it was government regulation and government markets that caused the bubble.

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No matter how many times it gets debunked, Republicans continue to claim that it was Fannie and Freddie that spurred the housing bubble. While the mortgage giants were no angels, Federal Reserve data shows that it was private mortgage brokers who drove the subprime housing bubble:

– More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

– Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

As this chart shows, the spike in issuances of mortgage backed securities that occurred between 2003 and 2007 was almost exclusively driven by private enterprises:

Wall Street firms divvied up the junk loans from subprime dealers and sold them all around the world, setting the state for the 2008 financial crisis. But Republicans (though not all of them) continue to cling to a story that the data doesn’t tell, in order to blame the government for the private sector’s sins.

GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has made no secret of her desire to slash corporate taxes. She has called for cutting the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 9 percent (at a cost of more than $2 trillion), said she is “open to” eliminating the corporate income tax entirely, and has endorsed letting corporations bring money that they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. without paying any taxes on it (when they would usually pay 35 percent).

Bachmann doubled down on her desire to allow companies to bring back (or repatriate) money at a low tax rate at a town hall yesterday, claiming that such a move would “butter up the economy,” bringing with it “a true stimulus”:

Overnight, we could have a true stimulus in this country. $1.2 trillion which, by the way, that’s still a lot of money. We could bring that money in almost overnight and that money could come here in the United States and it could buy more machines, and it could hire more employees, and have more research and more development, and buy more technology. In other words, butter up the economy so we could actually have more job creation.

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At its height, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the actual stimulus — was supporting 3.6 million jobs. It was still supporting 2.9 million jobs over the summer. Bachmann’s stimulus plan, meanwhile, has already been tried, with underwhelming results.

As we’ve pointed out many times before, Congress approved a repatriation tax holiday in 2004, with the justification that corporations would use the repatriated money to create jobs. Instead, they used it to pay dividends and buy stock. The corporations that benefited most from the holiday wound up cutting thousands of jobs in the following years, and then stashed more money overseas under the assumption Congress would approve another holiday someday.

Kristin Forbes, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of former President Bush’s council of economic advisers, said the holiday “didn’t accomplish it’s stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the U.S.” The Congressional Research Service also studied the tax holiday, and “found no evidence that the tax break resulted in ‘a corresponding increase in domestic investment or employment.’” So this is Bachmann’s “true stimulus”: giving corporations tax breaks in order for them to not create jobs.

Back in July, the Washington Post noted that many of GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s largest donors were Wall Street bankers, led by employees of mega-bank Goldman Sachs. Bloomberg added today that, so far, Romney, even in a crowded GOP field, has raised more than twice as much from Wall Street as President Obama:

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has raised more than twice as much money from Wall Street as Barack Obama — an edge gained in part by luring away at least 100 donors, mostly investors, who backed the president in 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The former Obama donors are helping the former Massachusetts governor lock up Wall Street dollars as Romney races to financially outpace primary rival Texas Governor Rick Perry in advance of the Sept. 30 third quarter deadline for campaign fundraising.

Romney has raised $2.3 million from the financial sector, while Obama has raised about $850,000.

The financial industry’s support for Romney should come as no surprise. After all, he has made attacking the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis — a centerpiece of his campaign. Likening financial regulators to “gargoyles,” Romney has called for the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank (even though he’s admitted that he’s not sure what’s in it).

Romney spent his business career in the financial sector, working at a private equity firm that caused thousands of Americans to lose their jobs. He has also appointed the chairman of a Wall Street front group to be one of his policy advisers. That’s evidently a perfect recipe for pulling in piles of Wall Street cash.

Last week, Republican spokesperson and former Bush administration operative Karl Rove showed up on Fox News to tell host Neil Cavuto that, contra the claims President Obama has made to justify the new taxes in his proposed deficit reduction package, the rich are already paying more than their fair share in taxes.

ROVE: Here are the facts. One percent of the American taxpayers pay 39 percent of the burden. The top two percent pay over half the burden. 50 percent of all the taxpayers pay 97 percent of the burden. You know, people are paying their fair share.

During the discussion, Fox News also threw up a series of charts (titled “Fair Share”), including one showing the top 1 percent of income earners paid 38.02 percent in federal personal income taxes in 2011. A panel on Fox Business took up the meme the same day, repeating several of the statistics and the charts, with four of the five panelists agreeing with Rove.

This general attitude — that the rich are unfairly taxed while the poor and working classes have “no skin in the game” — has become nearly ubiquitous amongst both right-wing politicians and their co-travelers in the media over the course of this year’s budget debate. On Fox News Sunday, for instance, host Chris Wallace brought up these numbers again: “The top one percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes… And the president thinks that the wealthy aren’t paying the fair share?”

First of all, these numbers apply only to federal income taxes — which Wallace, to his credit, acknowledged. But the distinction is often elided, allowing the impression that this applies to all taxes to slide by uncontested. Rove, for instance, never mentioned it. It’s just in the fine print of the charts. And whether it gets mentioned in other contexts on Fox News, or in arguments by Republicans, is highly hit or miss.

But individual income taxes made up only 44 percent of federal revenues in 2009. That same year, payroll taxes made up 42 percent of federal revenue. And in 2006, 86 percent of households with wage earners had higher payroll taxes than income taxes.

Payroll taxes apply a flat percentage rate to all of an individual’s income under $106,800, which makes payroll taxes highly regressive — i.e. the overall portion of income lost to the tax goes down as a person’s income goes up. In other words, while roughly two-fifths of the federal government’s revenue comes from progressive income taxes which fall harder on wealthier Americans, another two-fifths of that revenue comes from payroll taxes which fall harder on poorer and working class Americans.

Once state and local taxes are added, the right’s picture of the overtaxed rich deteriorates even further. Read more