Rick Perry’s Tax Plan: Watered Down Cainism

What’s the distributive impact of Rick Perry’s tax policy proposals? Well, if you guessed “good for rich people,” you’re right on:

This is a more modest regressive tax shift than the one implied by Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, but it’s exactly the same in its scope and direction. One of the interesting things about today’s GOP presidential campaign is the extent to which it reveals a total lack of policy disagreement about this. The different candidates’ ideas are all variants on the idea that what America needs is not just lower levels of taxation, but a specific focus on taxing rich people less. What you hear very little about is a theoretical explanation of why this addresses the unmistakeable economic disappointments of the past ten years. Did we not try this? Did Bush’s tax cuts not deliver enough “certainty?”