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| Rick Perry's "postcard" tax return (Photo by Mary Ann Chastain/AP) |
In the article which he authored, Perry offered his vision for simplifying the tax code and shrinking government toward the end goal of boosting the economy and balancing the budget.
Not to be out-marketed by rising Republican star Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 Tax Plan, Perry named his economic package the slightly less catchy Cut, Balance, and Grow Plan.
The three pillars of Perry's plan, cut taxes and spending, balance the budget, and grow the economy offer nothing new on the surface, but the devil is always in the details. Sadly, when you dig into the details of Perry's plan on his campaign website (which I already did to save you the suffering), what you don't find is anything new. What you find instead is an endless scroll of self-evident charts and graphs that are at best irrelevant (five different pie charts and a bar graphs to illustrate that the tax code is burdensome seems like overkill), and at worst misleading (a chart labeled "Swimming in Debt" shows we have the highest debt-to-GDP ratio since World War II, but fails to explain how this resulted largely from the Bush administration's refusal to raise taxes while waging two wars).
