GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain returned to the message that propelled his improbable rise in the polls by releasing a short animated movie explaining how he says his ‘9-9-9’ tax reform plan will reignite the economy.
“What would happen if we scrapped all 82,000 pages of the current tax code, and simplified things with Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan?” the film’s narrator asks. “The economy would accelerate faster than Barack Obama on his way out of town. We would add $2 trillion to GDP and create 6 million jobs. Business investment would increase by a third. Wages would go up by 10 percent. At the same time, federal revenues would go up 15 percent.”
It’s another quirky video in the candidate’s growing canon of unconventional campaign ads. Earlier this month, a Cain ad featuring his chief of staff, Mark Block, smoking a cigarette went viral.
The Cain campaign is looking to rebottle the lighting it caught when the candidate surprisingly rose to the top of the GOP field, only to fade amid allegations of sexual harassment and foreign policy missteps.
The movie is also a return to the simple message that got the Cain campaign rolling in the first place. As the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, it was Cain’s success as a businessman and his simple message on how to overhaul the economy that first endeared him to voters.
“The federal tax code is an overgrown monster — but it’s not even a cool monster, a dorky, mechanical monster held together by a bunch of tattered red tape and driven around by squirrelly bureaucrats,” the film says. “For far too long we’ve been the hapless victims of a monstrously dysfunctional tax code. It’s time to throw that baby out with the bathwater, and then bleach the tub.”
