GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain talked to t MSNBC’s Chuck Todd on “The Daily Rundown” on October 12, 2011. Cain claimed that his 9-9-9 tax plan would “level the playing field” by allowing businesses to deduct purchases made from American companies, arguing that the increase of competition would ultimately lower the prices of goods.
The video from MSNBC: The Daily Rundown is attached.
Cain wrote an article in 2005, denying the existence of a housing bubble, only to have the housing market implode within three years. When Todd pressed him about the mistake, Cain stated that he had missed “just how bad Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had distorted the housing market” and agreed that it did actually exist after “looking into it deeper.”
CAIN: What I missed in 2005 was just how bad Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had distorted the housing market. That's why I said what I said in '05 that I further learned later in terms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I honestly did not realize just how bad it was, just how bad the whole bundling and derivatives thing was and that we were on the brink of a total financial meltdown. So, I learned later on by looking into it deeper that the situation was a lot worse than I thought in 2005.
In regard to another article he’d written saying that Democrats were too harshly criticizing the Bush economic policies only to have Lehman Brothers collapse 15 days later, Cain said he was responding to reports that he had, and suggested that as president, he “will have people around me who are going to help me do deeper analyses on some of these things. But I didn't have sophisticated analyses helping me to draw the conclusions that I was drawing at that time.”
999
TODD: And Mr. Cain, everything you've described - hang on there - everything you've described -- only benefits those with very high incomes. What do you do for the family of four that makes $50,000 a year? They're not thinking about a death tax. They're not benefitting from capital gains taxes.
CAIN: Let's take your $50,000 a year family of four scenario. OK? Today under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes, assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions. I've gone through the math. $10,000.
Now, with 999, they're going to pay that nine personal - that nine percent tax on their income, so that's only $4,500. They still have $5,500 left over to apply to the sales tax fees. And if you go and look at what they -- how much of it they would probably spend on sales taxes for new goods -- not used. Used goods, they don't pay a sales tax. They are still going to have money left over, Chuck.
So what I asked people to do. Go through the math for your situation, because not all situations are the same, and for most people, they're going to have a net-net tax decrease because we've expanded the base.
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