Republican Waterloo

Well, I’d say it’s about over for Rick Perry.  Who on earth is preparing this man for these debates?  Guess who his concluding comment came from?  The funny thing is that he actually ripped the phrase off from Rick Santorum who ran away from it once he figured out its source; Langston Hughes.

Rick Perry turned in another underwhelming performance at tonight’s GOP presidential debate in Dartmouth on Tuesday night and signed off by quoting the title of a pro-union, pro-racial justice, and pro-immigrant poem written by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, titled “Let America Be America Again.”

The debate format was meant to be a ’round table’ but all I could see were square pegs.  A lot of the focus was on Mitt Romney who just earned the endorsement of Chris Christie.  Christie also defended Mitt’s faith against earlier value voters hatred.  Cain offered up a plan that is bound to put the economy into a tail spin and make the deficit worse.  Republican and Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett criticized it today.  Most economists are appalled.

Herman Cain, the former chief executive of the Godfather’s Pizza chain, has been enjoying a surge in polls, buoyed by his victory in a Florida straw poll and by wary conservatives who are seeking an alternative to Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry. He calls his signature economic proposal his “9-9-9 Plan”; as described on his website, it would eliminate the capital gains tax, the payroll tax and the inheritance tax and put in place a flat 9 percent tax on businesses, a 9 percent tax on personal income, and a new 9 percent federal sales tax on top of existing state and local sales taxes.

Mr. Cain’s frequent invocations of his “9-9-9 Plan” often get applause, but some economists warn that it would likely increase the deficit without providing many benefits. Bruce Bartlett, who held senior policy roles in the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush and who has become a critic of much recent Republican economic thinking, examined the Cain plan in a post on The New York Times’s Economix blog. He concluded that “the poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase.”

Rumors about Bachmann’s campaign and its lack of funds led to speculation that this might be her last debate appearance.  She offered up some even nuttier economics plans.  I have no idea why these folks haven’t figured out that sustained tax cuts do nothing but make the deficit worse. Evidently they only took courses in voodoo and faith-based economic policy because not one of them has anything that’s based in empirical evidence.

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who catapulted herself into contention in the race with a well-received debate performance over the summer but who has struggled to capture attention as her standing in the polls has ebbed, released her own economic plan Tuesday, before the debate. Its first provision calls for letting American companies repatriate the cash they have parked abroad without paying taxes. Her Web site maintains that such a tax holiday, which many companies are lobbying hard for, would “provide valuable capital for the job creators in this country and pump tremendous amounts of money into our economy.”

But when Congress and the Bush administration offered companies a similar tax incentive to repatriate money in 2005, studies found, it did not spur employment. The vast majority of the money that was brought back to the United States was returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to a study by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. So far, all of the Republican presidential candidates have taken a hard line against any tax increases, putting them at odds with what many voters have been telling pollsters this year. But the people most likely to vote in Republican primaries are also most likely to oppose tax increases.

Santorum’s economic plan is to go “to war with China”.

At Tuesday’s The Washington Post/Bloomberg Republican presidential debate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum declared that he actually wanted “to go to war with China.”

Fellow candidate Mitt Romney promised that if elected, he would immediately label China as a currency manipulator, but added, “I don’t want a trade war with anybody.”

“You know, Mitt, I don’t want to go to a trade war,” Santorum remarked. “I want to beat China. I want to go to war with China and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business.”

I’ll say one thing for this group of nitwits.  They sure are making Mitt Romney look sane. Just one more question.  Does any one really know why Newt Gingrich is still there?