Carnival of Stupid

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Two Dems, Nelson and Tester, voted with Republicans and Holy Joe Lieberman to kill the President’s jobs bill. This was not a vote on the bill itself, but a vote on whether the Senate would debate the bill. It needed 60 votes and only got 50, all Dems.

Conventional wisdom says Rick Perry’s presidential campaign is over. I had thought he probably would self-destruct before the nomination was settled, but I didn’t think it would be this fast.

What’s funny is that a lot of rightie bloggers are noticing that Perry is stupid. Yet you could line up the rest of the Seven Clowns and be hard pressed to find a measurable IQ in any of them. Mittens stands out mostly because he is less stupid than the rest of them, but he’s not exactly a rocket scientist, either.

The flavor du jour in rightieland is Herman Cain, who has an elaborate scheme to overhaul federal taxes so that the rich and corporations don’t have to pay so much. Bruce Bartlett explains why Cain’s plan is very, very stupid.

12 thoughts on “Carnival of Stupid”

  1. I sometimes wonder if the Republican powers that be didn’t handpick the Seven Deadly Clowns to run against him so that Romney could look positively presidential in comparison?

    And I suspect that Cain knows that he has zero chance at the nomination, but is out there figuring that this is an audition for his own FOX News show. Possibly opposite Rev. Sharpton on MSNBC?
    Maybe his former pizza company can sponsor his show, and it can be called “The Herman Cain Hour: Extra Cheesy – With Everything On It!”

  3. One other point I would add to Bartlett’s analysis: how do you reconcile a 9% national sales tax with all of the state and local sales taxes? I live in California, for instance, where sales taxes range between 7.25% and 9.75%. So either people would be paying between 16.25% and 18.75% on their purchases, or the state and local governments would have to cut their rates.

    And of course if consumers had to pay a premium of at least 16.25% to be able to buy anything, they would tend to either buy less or make their purchases under the table and evade the sales tax. So either way the plan would reduce the states’ tax revenue as well as the fed’s.

    • Stephen — all the flat tax schemes I’ve seen call for some ruinous increase in sales taxes that would drive most of the U.S. economy underground. This leads me to conclude that proponents of a flat or flatter tax are extremely stupid.

  4. Ben Nelson, GAH! In the Carnival of Stupid, he’s the tattooed guy with the greasy mullet who runs the Tilt-A-Whirl. Imagine giving that guy the power to decide important issues of the day.

  5. The flat tax scheme takes advantage of what most Americans can’t wrap their heads around.

    The richer you are the LESS you spend (as a percent of income). So the poor guy guy making 30K per year pays a real 9%, because he spends 100% of what he makes just to survive. If you make 3 million per year, you can live well on 1 million. The rest you invest to make money with money. The mantra of capitalism. Under this example the millionaire pays only 3% of his income in taxes because he only pays the flat 9% on a third of his income. (The third that he spends.)

  10. Herman Cain thinks he hit a home run with his 9-9-9 plan. It’s just like the abstinence only theory in appearing flawless to the shallow thinker, but he doesn’t take into account the intricacies called subsidies. The equality he’s claiming his plan delivers will be out the window once he has to deal the necessities that are required to keep the economy on an even keel by the use of subsidies. It’s a plain fact that markets have to be tuned on occasion by subsidy in order to remain viable and competitive.There’s no way around that reality.

    Did you catch Bachmann’s Christan barb about the “666 — the devil is in the details”. I knew she’d be working the Jesus angle…I just thought she’d be a little less obvious. Now I’m expecting her to announce that the gates of hell won’t prevail against her. Who knows, maybe she’ll give Cain a rebuke in the name of the Lord?

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