Gingrich joins Perry in calling for optional flat tax

Newt Gingrich joined Rick Perry in calling for an opt-in flat tax Tuesday, saying that his version would, at most, tax Americans at a 15 percent rate. Perry is proposing a 20 percent flat rate, and both candidates say they would preserve standard deductions and tax credits.

“An optional flat tax reform will be simple: Tax returns can be done on one sheet of paper,” Gingrich wrote in a column for the Quad-City Times in Iowa. “Subtract from income a standard deduction and deductions for charity and home ownership, multiply the result by the fixed single rate of taxation of at most 15%, and the process is over.”

Republican candidates have been looking with envy at the success Herman Cain has enjoyed on the back of his 9-9-9 tax proposal, which would replace current federal taxes with flat 9 percent corporate, income and sales taxes. In a New York Times/CBS poll released Tuesday, Cain led the Republican field, with more support than Gingrich and Perry combined.

Gingrich said that his tax changes would “liberate capital to create new jobs” and “liberate taxpayers from the IRS code.” But he also underscored the simplicity of his plan, playing to voters who support Cain’s proposal — and might balk at Mitt Romney’s comprehensive 59-point economic plan.

“This concept of an optional flat tax would give American taxpayers an opportunity to choose simplicity versus complexity and a single rate over a lot of deductions," Gingrich wrote.

Gingrich said, in an acknowledgment that his proposal would likely bring in far less revenue than the current tax code, because wealthier Americans would pay far less, that he believed his proposal would pay for itself by stimulating the economy. The former Speaker of the House posited that if his tax code were enacted alongside deep cuts to the federal budget, the economy would rebound to 1990s-style growth.

“The result of a record number of Americans working resulted in a dramatic turnaround in the fiscal and debt outlook of the United States," Gingrich said.

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