As the Occupy Wall Street protests pick up steam and spread across the nation, I hold out hope that people will stand for real and radical change in the way that politics and the economy work in this country.
However, any hope that I have for such a radical but necessary shift in the economic structure of our society is tempered by the rise in Herman Cain whose main support seems to be coming from the working class adherents of the Tea Party movement. The only explanation I can have for this is the theory of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the anxiety that is induced in one who simultaneously holds beliefs that are contradictory. For example, one may wish to live a long life, but at the same time smoke. We know that these two things cannot exist together since smoking has been proven to significantly shorten one's life. The way one alleviates the anxiety is to somehow explain the contradiction, either by justifying it (I don't smoke a lot and I know I will quit one day so I won't die from it) or by simply ignoring the contradiction altogether (the scientific evidence linking smoking to emphysema and lung cancer is incorrect).
This type of illogical justification is the only reason I can come up with to explain how middle and lower class voters can be drawn to Herman Cain. Cain is proposing the single biggest transfer of the tax burden in this country from the wealthy to the poor. His 9-9-9 plan proposes a 9% federal income tax across the board, a 9% federal corporate tax across the board, and a 9% federal sales tax across the board. His plan would eliminate most, if not all, deductions and would also eliminate capital gains, payroll and estate taxes.
Let's think about that for a minute. Under Cain's plan, 23,000 millionaires would pay no tax at all since their income comes entirely from capital gains. Every person in the highest tax bracket would receive the largest tax break in history (35% to 9%). Together with this, there would be a tremendous transfer of tax burden to the poorest individuals in the nation. In addition to the fact that Cain's plan eliminates the earned income tax credit and many other deductions that ordinary Americans rely on (there are arguments to be made in favor of this, but not under this insane plan), the 9% sales tax Cain proposes means that a much larger percentage of working Americans income will go toward paying federal taxes than the wealthiest Americans (since a gallon of milk costs the same for Joe Sixpack or Donald Trump). Not to mention what would happen to Social Security and Medicare.
Cain is Robin Hood in reverse -- stealing from the poor to give to the rich. We've had enough of this in the past 30 years, we surely don't need more. Anybody who makes less than $250,000 a year and is supporting Herman Cain is voting against their own economic best interest. And trust me, although he is promising that his plan will lift the poor out of their prison of poverty and help them become rich, Herman Cain has no interest in helping you make money.
My only hope is that the issues being raised by Occupy Wall Street and that have been raised on this blog and by me to anyone who would listen over the past several years, will start to filter through to ordinary Americans. None of the people running for President from either of the two major parties have your economic interests at heart. Some are better than others. None are worse than Herman Cain.
So when you decide you might like Herman Cain and you feel that pang of anxiety in your chest -- don't try to explain it away. It's just your brain trying to steer you in the right direction.
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