This past week, Herman Cain, a former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, became the latest in the cavalcade of Republican presidential front runners. He replaced Rick Perry, who replaced Mitt Romney, who replaced Michele Bachmann, who replaced Donald Trump, who replaced Sarah Palin. If history is any indication, he won’t be the last. GOP voters have changed their opinions so frequently that he might have dropped out of the top slot entirely between when The Huntington News prints and when you read it.

Yet, he is leading the polls, and as such we should examine his policies. On immigration, he supports building a fence across the span of the US-Mexico border, noting that “it’s going to be 20 feet high … It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you – Warning.’” He helpfully added that the sign would be both in English and in Spanish, although he subsequently stated that he was joking.

On religion, Cain has claimed that Muslims “have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them,” and stated that would not hire a Muslim in his administration, citing a “creeping attempt … to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government.” The statement was made at a Conservative Principles Conference in March. A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations noted that Cain’s accusations about Sharia law “would be laughable if it weren’t having such a negative impact on the lives of Muslim Americans.”

But the crown jewel of Cain’s policies is his so-called 9-9-9 plan, which calls for a 9 percent income tax, 9 percent business tax and a national 9 percent sales tax. This plan, he says, would make taxes fairer, simpler and better for Americans. And on the face of it, it sounds great. But even a peek under the hood shows that there’s nothing to it.

Putting aside the fact that it would require a nearly instantaneous and massive revision to the nation’s taxes, and because it was designed largely as a deliberate plan to garner attention for the campaign, and considering it was designed by an accountant with no research, academic or economic experience, the plan is a bad idea simply because it is almost comically naïve.

Bruce Bartlett, a chief policy advisor for the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, performed an analysis for the New York Times on what little the Cain campaign has released about the program. He notes that Cain’s plan would result immediately in lowering income tax rates on the top 4 percent of earners and ending over $100 billion in capital gains taxes without offsetting these losses. This essentially means that those making over $1 million a year would see colossal tax cuts while leaving the vast majority of Americans as is.

The 9-9-9 plan would subsequently get rid of payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare, and the $800 billion in revenue that come with it. Partially to offset this, all personal exemptions would vanish, meaning that the 47 percent of filers who do not currently pay a federal income tax will now pay 9 percent of their already meager income without any offset.

Don’t forget the 9 percent sales tax, either, which would apply to the vast majority of purchases. Without exemptions on necessities like food, clothing and rent, this tax would take an even larger chunk of revenue from people already struggling to make ends meet. Barrett notes that the poor would suddenly find themselves with a 9 percent cost of living increase using only 91 percent of their previous income.

Barrett concluded that, under the Cain plan, “the poor would pay more while the rich would have their taxes cut, with no guarantee that economic growth will increase and good reason to believe that the budget deficit will increase,” and he called 9-9-9 “exceptionally ill conceived.”

He’s exceptionally right. The fact that the leading candidate for one of the two major parties in the country with the largest economy on the planet is advocating a plan that would essentially force its poorest citizens to subsidize its wealthiest is almost cartoon-like in its cruelty. Cain might as well go all-out Dick Dastardly, grow a curly mustache and tie the economy to some railroad tracks.

Hopefully the Republicans will come to their senses shortly and nominate someone whose policies make sense outside of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

– Michael Denham can be reached at [email protected].