Ted Cruz is even less electable than Donald Trump

The Republican Party establishment has a bad case of Trump-Induced Terror these days, but there's an even more plausible candidate in the race who's running on an even more unelectable agenda.

May I introduce to you Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who's now pulled ahead of Donald Trump in some Iowa polls.

People know that Cruz is extreme. But few people fully recognize exactly how unpopular the Cruz policy agenda is likely to be once it is exposed to the light of day.

In an era when no politician of either party wants to cut retirement benefits for current seniors or raise taxes on the middle class, Cruz has quietly stumbled into proposing a gigantic tax increase on middle-class retirees. The media hasn't noticed yet, and liberal groups don't seem all that eager to point it out — perhaps because they're hoping to save their ammunition until after Cruz is actually the nominee. Cruz's appeal is rooted in his deep understanding of the GOP base and sophisticated grasp of the modern media landscape. But he's never run in a meaningfully contested general election of any kind, and trying to do so on an anti–middle class, anti-elderly policy agenda is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.

Ted Cruz is quietly running on a 19 percent sales tax
If you're not paying close attention, Cruz's tax plan can just look like a more extreme version of every other Republican tax plan — a big, budget-busting tax cut for the wealthy. But in reality, it contains an idea so obviously politically toxic that his entire agenda for selling it seems to be to obscure the fact that he's proposing it.

But let's be clear: Cruz is calling for a 19 percent federal sales tax that would apply to all purchases of goods and services made in the United States. This is possibly the single least voter-friendly idea one could imagine.

It's so toxic that he doesn't call it a 19 percent federal sales tax at all.

"For businesses, the corporate income tax will be eliminated," Cruz writes on his website. "It will be replaced by a simple Business Flat Tax at a single 16 percent rate."

This sounds like Cruz is calling for the replacement of the current loophole-ridden corporate income tax with a new flat corporate income tax featuring a broader base and a lower rate. But that's not what Cruz is proposing at all. His "business flat tax" is a sales tax, not a corporate income. And it's a 19 percent sales tax, not a 16 percent one.

The Tax Foundation, a center-right think tank that believes in giving conservative tax plans extremely generous "dynamic" scores, explains that Cruz's business tax is "often known as a subtraction-method value-added tax" and "its base is identical in economic terms to that of the credit-invoice VAT seen in many OECD countries."

Okay, so Cruz's business tax is a value-added tax, but what's a value-added tax? For that, it's useful to turn to Curtis Dubay, a Heritage Foundation tax expert, who explained it in 2010.

"Consumers would experience no difference between a national sales tax and a VAT," Dubay writes. "A sales tax and a VAT designed to raise equal amounts of revenue would raise the final price of purchases by roughly the same amount." The difference between a VAT and a sales tax is in how they are collected — Cruz's version would be paid directly to the federal government and invisible to consumers — not in where the burden actually lies.

[link to www.vox.com]

Less than 50%