Rick Perry’s 20-20 Vision

Charles Pierce sums up the true issue:

It is on days like this that I don’t envy political economists. They’re the ones that are going to have to take this Message from Goobertown seriously. They’re going to have to score it. They’re going to have to do the math, such as it is, and try to find a coherent formation in this unwieldy parade of hackneyed talking points (Kill the Estate Tax and Save the Family Farm!) and tired applause lines (The Job Creators Are Uncertain!). They’re the ones who are going to have to find a way to square the utter abandonment of the progressive income tax, a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a return to explosively inflationary health-care costs, an unchained and undoubtedly newly amok financial-services industry, and the partial privatization of Social Security, all of which Goodhair has managed to wedge into “Cap, Balance, and Grow (!).”

(By now, I figure the political economists are going to be hopelessly drunk and firing rubber bands at each other.)

They’re the ones who are going to have to tell the family of the sad-eyed young intern in the corner that their son, a Wharton grad with a brilliant future, studied this plan for a couple of hours and then screamed, “But it doesn’t make sense!” prior to trying to feed himself into the fax machine in a vain attempt to get as far as possible from any place where this nonsense is taken seriously.

Personally speaking, I’m not bothering. When you’ve already lost Pete Davis, you can pretty much give up on anyone believing your economics will work:

Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) proposed his tax reform plan today and wrote this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Unfortunately, it’s just a slapdash of slogans. If this plan were enacted as proposed, it would lose a lot of revenue, reward the rich, and complicate filing for most taxpayers.

Giving taxpayers the option would also mean that only those who pay less would opt in, guaranteeing significant revenue loss. [OPENING QUOTE ADDED, sans original links; go read the whole thing]

And Andrew Samwick piles on with the politics:

And now we have another version of the flat tax, as if the crushing irrelevance of Steve Forbes to the primaries in 1996 and 2000 were not an indication of how unproductive the discussion will ultimately be. What are the prospects that a Republican President would actually be able to implement such a change if elected? They are equal to the chance that Republicans will both retain control of the House and secure a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in 2012. In other words, absolutely zero.

Personally speaking, I don’t think the odds on that election scenario are “absolutely zero” (but I count people like Ben Nelson, who fellated George W Bush from the beginning, referring to him in interviews as “the King,” as part of that “filibuster-proof majority”). But the rest of the analysis is spot-on.