Herman Cain’s ’9-9-9′ plan may have come from SimCity
Herman Cain is the latest person-who-isn’t-Mitt-Romney to enchant the Republican base, largely to the popularity of his “9-9-9 plan” to cap federal income tax, sales tax and corporate tax at 9%. But did his plan have an unlikely source?
HuffPost has gone big with a story this afternoon pointing out the similarities between Cain’s plan and the default tax option in the popular video game SimCity 4. Namely, they are almost exactly the same! In the 2003 computer game, commercial taxes, industrial taxes and residential taxes were all originally set at 9%. Take a look!
Pretty funny, right? And while we doubt that Herman Cain was spending the early 2000s in SimCity trying to build the perfect Cainville — the dude had a pizza franchise to run! — we still desperately hope that that was the case.
Still though, at least the HuffPost story gave us these delightful quotes:
Adopting such a simple tax structure, [Senior SimCity 4 producer Kip]
Katsarelis said, would allow fantasy political leaders to focus their
energy on infrastructure and national security. “Our game design team
thought that an easy to understand taxation system would allow players
to focus on building their cities and have fun thwarting giant lizard
attacks, rather than be buried by overly complex financial systems.”…When asked about similarities between Cain’s plan and SimCity’s default tax rates, Cain campaign spokesman JD Gordon replied, “Well, we all like 9-9-9.”
And this zinger, from HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel:
Presumably, under the Cain plan, disasters would be turned off.
What do you think? Are you worried Cain will force us all to launch the arcologies?
