Joe Conason: The Tax Hikes That Republicans Love - Truthdig

Herman Cain's regressive 9-9-9 plan would
eliminate the earned income credit, tax every dollar even the lowest income
workers earn, and cap it off with capital gains tax of 9% and  a 9% national sales tax!

It is the principle of the graduated income tax that today's Republican Party activists reject.  Their voters respond to the politics of suburban resentment of which New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is an apostle and master practitioner.  Joe Conason explains how it works.
As the Republican campaign develops - in the face of President Obama's American Jobs Act - it is increasingly clear that the politics of resentment drives the opposition.  Don't tax me to give them jobs! I am overtaxed to pay for them - and "they" are undertaxed!  So Herman Cain's `9-9-9' plan surges in popularity.  
No measurable group of voters really wants a 9% national sales tax.  But they do like the flat 9% income tax: because it will increase the tax burden on low income earners and lower it even further on high income earners.  I certainly would like to keep another $20,000 on the first $100k we earn.   And the second!   And if our savings ever again show any actual capital gain, we would be happy to pay only 9% capital gains tax.  But personal advantage is not what should drive tax policy.
 - GWC
Joe Conason: The Tax Hikes That Republicans Love - Truthdig:

"Republican politicians increasingly reject the earned income credit as an immoral form of “welfare,” because its provisions have helped to ensure that roughly 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax, with the poorest receiving a modest rebate, instead. That statistic has been distorted all too often into the false assertion, usually uttered on Fox News Channel or right-wing talk radio, that the poorer half of the nation’s population “pays no taxes.”

Of course the working poor pay lots of taxes. In fact, they tend to pay more as a share of their income than the very rich, plenty of whom do not work at all. The poor pay state and local income tax as well as sales taxes, gas taxes and utility taxes, but above all they pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on the very first dollar of income they earn (and on every dollar up to the $106,000 ceiling that shelters the income of higher earners). To suggest that the working poor receive government benefits without paying anything is a brazen lie."

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