Politics & Power Quote by Herman Cain

Cain sells the 9-9-9 plan like a defibrillator: not a tweak, a jolt. The word "resuscitate" frames the economy as clinically endangered and Washington as the negligent doctor. That’s a familiar political move, but Cain’s business-first persona gives it a particular edge: he’s not promising a technocratic fix so much as an executive intervention, a clean, decisive reset.

The rhetoric hinges on moralizing complexity. The "outdated tax code" isn’t just inefficient; it’s corrupt, a machine that "allows politicians to pick winners and losers". That phrase borrows from anti-crony-capitalism language while quietly dodging the fact that any tax system picks winners and losers - just more visibly when rates and deductions vary. Cain’s subtext is that neutrality equals fairness, and fairness equals growth. The villain isn’t inequality or stagnation; it’s political discretion.

The genius (and the tell) is how he translates ideology into a mnemonic. "9% business flat tax, 9% personal flat tax, 9% sales tax" is policy as a chant: easy to repeat, hard to interrogate. It sidesteps distributional questions - who pays more when you add a national sales tax? - by wrapping the plan in the cultural glow of simplicity. In the post-2008, Tea Party-era mood, complexity read as rigging. Cain’s pitch meets that anger with an elegant-sounding number set, positioning him as the outsider who can remove the thumb from the scale by flattening the scale itself.