Herman Cain's 9-9-9 would be a taxing disaster

Jon Huntsman Jr. may have had the best reaction to Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax proposal, which like all things catchy and simple has been generating buzz in recent days.

"I thought it was the price of a pizza," the former Utah governor said in a recent debate.

Ha! Pizza. Get it? Cain used to be CEO of Godfather's Pizza.

But while you're dreaming of a $9, nine topping, nine drink deal that might have made it to a Godfathers near you (and then kept you up all night), it may be time to pause and give Cain some credit.

In campaigns, catchy ideas catch on only if they resonate on some deeper level. In this case, Cain tapped into a truth many taxpayers understand: The current income tax system is way too complicated.

By some estimates, 60 percent of us hire someone else to help us figure our taxes each year at a total cost of $163 billion, and if you combined all the time everyone spends doing the figuring, it adds to about 6.1 billion hours.

The IRS says there are 3.8 million words in the tax code. That's far more than appear in the Bible, and you know how much trouble Americans have keeping up with that book.

It's fair to say that no one — not you, not your tax preparer and not the IRS investigator who will come knocking on your door if you do your forms wrong — really understands it all.

There is a reason Election Day does not fall in mid-April.

But now, credit duly given, it's time to tell the rest of the story. Cain's plan would be disastrous.

Sure, he would shrink the tax code from its more-than-Biblical proportions to a series of taxes just one short of the 10 Commandments, but it has one fatal flaw. Americans do not go to polls every four years to elect a dictator.

President Cain would have to deal with a Congress. His plan is to reduce income tax rates to a flat 9 percent for individuals and 9 percent for businesses and then, drum-roll please, add a 9 percent national sales tax. The details are still sketchy, but Cain would remove all deductions except for charitable contributions.

Imagine, for a moment, the battles that would ensue on Capitol Hill. Every deduction comes with a built-in special-interest lobby. Unless whatever bill that emerged would temper the tax rates for the poor, it would be attacked on that front, as well. And the anti-business lobby wouldn't like the 9 percent business rate.