One of the more exotic policy tendencies of Wingnut World is a history of strong and pervasive support for replacing income taxes with higher consumption taxes. Many conservatives support this step on grounds that it will promote savings and investment, which is another way of saying that they believe capital should not be taxed at all. Others like the idea of getting rid of the compliance costs and “bureaucracy” associated with income taxes, and still others are attracted to the “flat” nature of consumption taxes, which do not vary based on the taxpayer’s personal circumstances (whether it’s income, or the various characteristics that earn deductions and credits against income tax liability).

The so-called “Fair Tax”—the general term used for any number of schemes for shifting from federal income to consumption taxes—has been a hardy perennial for years among conservative activists and talk show hosts. Among the latter was Herman Cain, whose so-called 9-9-9 (replacing current federal income, capital gains and estate taxes with a 9 percent national sales tax, a 9 percent VAT on corporations, and a 9 percent income tax with no deductions or credits) plan is explicitly advertised as an intermediate step towards a “Fair Tax.” Like the “Fair Tax,” Cain’s plan seems to have great curb appeal for rank-and-file conservatives, but less so for opinion-leaders.

Cain’s recent surge in the polls as a presidential candidate has suddenly put 9-9-9 and the broader movement to get rid of progressive income taxes under a microscope. On the eve of Tuesday night’s candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, the Urban Institute/Brookings Tax Policy Center published an analysis of the distributional implications of Cain’s proposal that immediately became fodder for his rivals and for critics generally. Faced with claims that 9-9-9 would boost total taxes for most American households with annual income under $200,000, Cain was reduced to repetitive denials without much in the way of explanation. Even among conservatives who are not troubled morally or politically by the idea of making federal taxes massively more regressive, the argument that 9-9-9 would give Uncle Sam a new instrument for confiscating private dollars (the national sales tax) is getting some traction. One of 9-9-9’s designers, the ubiquitous Steven Moore, is already urging Cain to replace the sales tax proposal with a 9 percent payroll tax.

There is virtually no broad-based polling of 9-9-9 available (figuring out how to describe it in a survey question is a real challenge, particularly since Cain and his advisers are not always very precise). But a new HuffPo/Patch survey of activist leaders in early caucus and primary states (whom they call “Power Outsiders”) shows lukewarm support at best.

The timing of the intra-party assault on Cain’s signature domestic policy proposal is no coincidence. It is based on the belief that he is a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon whose lofty support levels represent a “parking place” for conservatives who don’t like Mitt Romney but haven’t been sold on any of his competitors, and find Cain interesting and refreshing, not to mention his usefulness as an all-purpose antidote to suspicions that conservative hatred of Obama is at least partially racial in origin.

Tuesday night’s debate represents a transition point from a six-week stretch of frequent debates, to the run-up to actual voting events. Earlier this week another important piece of the nominating contest puzzle fell into place when Iowa set a firm date of January 3 for its “First-in-the-Nation Caucus.” There remains a not-insignificant chance that New Hampshire will schedule its primary for early in December in order to avoid too-close proximity to Nevada Caucuses currently planned for January 14, though it’s more likely that Nevada will move a few days in order to let NH have its event on January 10. Any way you slice it, though, candidates have a relatively brief window of time to get their act together before voters in the early states begin to become distracted by the holidays, which will also make negative campaigning problematic on grounds that it conflicts with the “spirit of the season.”

With Mitt Romney presumed to have a commanding lead in two of the five January events (NH and Nevada), developments in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida are of particular interest at this juncture. New NBC/Marist polls in SC and FL show Cain and Romney basically tied with just under a third of the vote each, with Perry mired in the high single-digits. This state of affairs is close to where the most recent polling in Iowa has placed the race there as well. If, as the conventional wisdom suggests, Cain soon begins to lose support because of attacks on 9-9-9, his lack of policy sophistication generally, or simply the fading novelty of his candidacy, the big question is whether those votes go back to Rick Perry, are scattered among various candidates, or even go in significant numbers to Mitt Romney. In any event (barring a December NH primary), media coverage of the campaign will now focus ever-increasingly on Iowa, where the picture is complicated by the relative importance of the “ground game” and Romney’s decision so far not to seriously compete in the state. Cain’s organizational weakness in Iowa is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that his former state director (who quit because her candidate seemed to be ignoring the state) just signed up for a less elevated job with Rick Santorum. So in the place where the 2012 nominating contest formally begins in less than eleven weeks, the two front-runners in that state and nationally are not really running at all. Something’s got to give, and soon.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

At a time when we are constantly being told that no one in America cares about anything other than the economy, one of Wingnut World’s most durable forums for people who intensely care about cultural issues was held this last weekend. The Value Voters Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council, attracted every significant GOP presidential candidate other than Jon Hunstman. But as has often been the case, the controversial nature of the event’s sponsors and speakers overshadowed anything the candidates had to say.

Most notably, Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist minister from Dallas who was asked by conference sponsors to introduce Rick Perry (he’s a long-standing supporter of his governor and one was one of the pillars of Perry’s big prayer event back in August), made big waves by going out of his way to tell reports he regarded Mitt Romney’s LDS church as a “cult.” This is an old refrain for Jeffress, but casting the Republican presidential nominating contest as a war of religious identity in which Christians should follow Perry was sure to grab headlines. Moreover, one of the main speakers at the event was Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (a major Value Voters Summit co-sponsor), who lived down to his reputation as a purveyor of all sorts of bigotry, mainly aimed at gays, Muslims and Mormons. Romney, who preceded Fischer at the podium, was driven to an indirect swipe at him for “crossing a line,” which of course just gave Fischer a new excuse to whine about being persecuted.

The whole series of events led some commentators to wonder if a sustained attack on Romney’s religion, with or without the complicity of Rick Perry, had been launched to stiffen resistance to the 2012 front-runner among white conservative evangelicals.

The presidential candidate who was most successful in cutting through all the distractions at the Value Voters Summit was Herman Cain, whose stock speech is still blowing the doors off in conservative gatherings. He got a lot of standing ovations, but perhaps the biggest greeted his assurance that he and other African-Americans had nothing to be angry about thanks to the opportunities they’d received as Americans.

On a more formal level, Ron Paul registered at the event by winning its Straw Poll by a comfortable margin. The ability of his supporters to routinely dominate straw polls (except for those like August event in Iowa that attracted many thousands of attendees, or the P5 straw poll in Florida where voters were delegates elected months earlier) simply by flooding the room has seriously eroded the news values of his wins.

As the presidential candidates prepared for another debate on Tuesday, polls continued to document an ongoing collapse in support for Rick Perry and a corresponding surge for Herman Cain—not just in national surveys, but in the states that play an early role in the nominating contest. In Iowa, where no public polls were released during September, and late August polls showed Perry romping into an immediate lead, two surveys from NBC-Marist and Public Policy Polling came out this week documenting Perry’s slide into fourth or fifth place, and Cain’s rise to a position rivaling Mitt Romney. Since the Iowa Caucuses require both grassroots support and a strong organization to bring it out on a cold winter night, Cain’s weak organization in the state makes actual success in the caucuses more problematic (conversely, Perry is thought to have a very good Iowa organization). Aside from the Perry-Cain dynamic, the new numbers from Iowa show how tempting it is becoming for Mitt Romney to leap into Iowa (which he’s largely avoided, no doubt because of the high cost he paid for losing Iowa in an upset in 2008) and pursue an early knockout with a run through Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the first three stops on the primary trail.

When the candidates assembled in New Hampshire on October 11 for a Bloomberg/WaPo debate focused on the economy, most attention was devoted to Cain, who predictably drew criticism of his signature 9-9-9 tax proposal; Romney, who had emerged from the ashes of Perry’s early ascendency to regain front-runner status (a trend punctuated by an early endorsement from Chris Christie); and Rick Perry, who needed a gaffe-free debate and some renewed sense of attachment to the hard-core conservatives who had been abandoning him for Herman Cain. The general take is that Romney cruised (getting in an extended crowd-pleasing attack on China’s commercial policies and taking a shot at Perry’s indifference to the plight of the uninsured in Texas). Cain did well but opened himself to further trouble on the details of 9-9-9 (Santorum drew some blood pointing out that the plan’s new national sales tax would not be popular in NH). Perry made no mistakes, but made no gains; RedState’s Erick Erickson concluded he was “rapidly becoming the Fred Thompson of the campaign season,” a deadly comparison given Thompson’s high potential and quick fade in 2008.

Aside from the debate’s horse-race nature, it reinforced once again how far the entire field has drifted from what used to be considered the mainstream of political discourse. All the candidates agreed the housing and financial crises of 2008-2009 were entirely created by the federal government, not the financial sector, and most implied excessive lending to the poor and minorities was a big part of the problem. All the candidates appear to favor deliberate deflationary monetary policies. All the candidates who spoke on the topic rejected any budget compromise that involved either tax increases or defense cuts. Two candidate, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, told egregious lies about the relationship between “ObamaCare” and Medicare, pursuing the old “death panel” meme with renewed vigor. And to cap it all off, when Rick Perry was asked a direct question about income inequality, he didn’t seem to grasp the problem at all.

It looks like the eventual winner will have to bring a translator along when it’s time to debate the president. Many Americans don’t speak wingnut.

Ideological litmus tests have always been a big feature of Wingnut World, with Americans for Tax Reform chief Grover Norquist’s “pledge” against support for tax increases being the most famous example. Grover’s pledge has been in the news lately, as Senate Republicans grappled with the question of whether a vote to kill tax incentives for ethanol development would run afoul of Norquist, who has always demanded that any revenue-enhancing action to close off a tax loophole be paired with a tax cut to make the action revenue-neutral.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has been trying to secure Republican support for revenue measures (but not tax rate increases) as part of a deficit deal. In a ploy that was almost certainly a direct challenge to Norquist’s authority in the GOP, Sen. Coburn organized a vote to end ethanol subsidies. With some Democratic support, Coburn prevailed in the Senate. But now House Republicans are dragging their feet on any parallel action on ethanol or other corporate tax subsidies, and Norquist is predicting that Coburn is leading the GOP down the road to out-and-out tax increases.

There’s no question that any Grand Bargain on the deficit will involve provisions opposed by Norquist, whether or not they go beyond “tax reform” proposals that offset revenue measures at least in part by rate cuts. What’s unclear is whether violations of Grover’s pledge will form the basis for primary challenges to violators in the future. The last high-profile backslider on the ATR pledge was George H.W. Bush, who in turn had won the 1988 presidential nomination in no small part because Bob Dole refused to sign it.

A different pledge has also made a splash in Republican politics during the last week: a four-plank oath administered to presidential candidates by the hard-core anti-abortion group, the Susan B. Anthony List. Candidates pledge:

FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;

SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;

THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;

FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.

The third and fourth planks reflect the current national anti-choice strategy – the fourth promotes a federal version of the laws recently enacted in several states banning abortions after 20 weeks on “fetal pain” grounds.

Five GOP presidential candidates—Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum—immediately signed the SBA pledge. Four—Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson—pointedly did not. Romney refused to sign on grounds that the planks on funding cutoffs and appointments are too broad. Cain rather strangely argued that no president should be pledged to interfere with congressional prerogatives by “advancing” legislation, while Huntsman seems to object to the whole idea of pledges. Bachmann and Santorum quickly attacked Romney’s failure to sign the pledge as another sign of his lack of commitment to the anti-choice cause, and Santorum has also gone after Huntsman.

Keep in mind that with the exception of minor candidate Gary Johnson, all of the Republican presidential candidates embrace a categorical anti-choice position that favors a total ban on abortions regardless of the stage of pregnancy and removal of the constitutionally-established limit on abortion restrictions involving the health of the pregnant woman. The SBA pledge is interesting in that it requires support for specific strategies to reach the agreed-upon goal of a return to the days when virtually all abortions were illegal, along with restrictions on contraceptive measures that right-to-lifers now consider equivalent to abortion.

Because these distinctions aren’t that well-known outside the ranks of anti-choice activism, it’s unclear what if any impact the SBA Pledge controversy will have on actual voters. But it could matter in those early states, such as Iowa and South Carolina, where social conservatives are especially strong. And the flap will certainly become another talking point in the effort to convince conservatives that Mitt Romney cannot be trusted.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

The Tax Day (or more accurately, Tax Weekend) observances of the Tea Party movement weren’t as large or well-publicized as in the past, but they did reflect the hardening consensus of conservative activists against both the appropriations deal just agreed to by congressional Republicans, and the coming legislation increasing the public debt limit. This consensus is being reinforced by potential presidential candidates and other opinion leaders who are encouraging the perception that the Beltway GOP is once again “selling out” the conservative movement and its latest Tea Party incarnation.

This snapshot of the mood at New Hampshire Tea Party events by Michael Crowley is illustrative:

The overall picture is one of a restless Republican base that sees defeating Obama as a matter of national survival. Angry conservatives believe Washington is spending the country into oblivion, and that lazy freeloaders are leeching federal money at the expense of ever more squeezed middle-class taxpayers. They also feel that the Washington game is rigged against them: “We’re constantly being lied to,” fumed Dan Dwyer of Nashua at a local GOP confab on Thursday night, still angry that Republicans had “caved” in their budget negotiations with Democrats earlier this month.

At a Wisconsin Tea Party rally, anger at congressional Republicans was fed by none other than Sarah Palin, who “unleashed a withering critique of congressional Republicans Saturday, lambasting them for not cutting spending deeper and faster, and saying the party needs to ‘fight like a girl.’” Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, who spoke at a number of Tea Party events, has been urging Republicans to oppose a debt limit increase on the questionable grounds that arrangements could be made to avoid a federal credit default until the autumn.

The superficially confusing aspect of this rhetoric is that the conservatives who are being most vocal about the dire nature of the deficit-and-debt emergency are precisely the same people who are fearful that congressional Republicans might cut some long-term budget deal with Senate Democrats and the administration that leaves increased taxes on the wealthy on the table. That’s why they are linking any approval of a debt limit increase not just to some deficit agreement, but to acceptance of the kind of deep spending cuts and “entitlement reforms” laid out in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.

Accordingly, we will soon see Tea Party fire concentrate on those Senate Republicans said to be negotiating a deal that would include some tax increases. The Republican point man in the so-called “Gang of Six” of bipartisan senators engaged in these negotiations, Saxby Chambliss of GA, is already drawing unfriendly home-state fire from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who had this to say today:

Senate Republicans are going to support raising the debt ceiling and raising taxes all while refusing to demand passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment. House Republican Leaders will no doubt decide that . . . well . . . Republicans only control one house of one branch of government so . . . .

Bend over America.

This conflict will soon make it more obvious than ever that most conservative activists, including those identified with the Tea Party Movement, are less concerned with deficit reduction than with permanently shrinking the size and reach of the federal government and pushing both radical spending cuts and continued tax cuts.

On another front, there are growing signs that Republican elites have decided to give Donald Trump the same dismissive treatment that was said to have led to Sarah Palin’s steady decline in credibility as a potential presidential candidate. Over the weekend, Karl Rove called Trump a “joke candidate.” Playing his snooty Tory role, George Will called The Donald a “blatherskite,” and warned he could seriously screw up Republican presidential candidate debates. Slate’s Dave Weigel went to the trouble of reading Trump’s 2000 proto-campaign book, and noticed that Trump expressed a fondness for the Canadian single-payer health care system. Surfing off that disclosure, the Club for Growth put out a release calling Trump a “liberal.”

It’s almost certain that this offensive was stimulated by the Public Policy Polling survey of Republicans that was released on Friday showing Trump jumping out into a sizable national lead over the rest of the potential presidential field. Trump’s 26 percent is higher than any proto-candidate has registered in early national polls. And the internals, showing 23 percent of Republicans saying that could not vote for a candidate who believes Barack Obama was born in the United States (and another 39 percent saying they weren’t sure if they could or not), were probably terrifying to beltway GOPers.