GOP Candidate Rick Perry's Plan for Reform

COMMENTARY | Public worker entitlements and federal spending are no friends of Rick Perry. Neither are the politicians who stuff that stuff down the throat of the nation. Perry would flat-out cut, balance, and grow with a plan for prosperity with the same name.

Perry's "Cut, Balance and Grow" plan starts out with a taxpayer's choice between one's current rate or a 20 percent flat tax rate that allows continued exemptions from mortgage interest and charitable donations. What a nice choice to have!

Businesses will get the same break, with a 20 percent tax rate for corporations. With the effect of spurring investment, companies would not be taxed at higher rates on monies earned from operations in other countries. These will affect spurring of the economy right here, increasing sales, and putting businesses back in business.

CPAs in the business of preparing your taxes will need to find other accounting work, however. As Perry put it in his Wall Street Journal piece, "This simple 20% flat tax will allow Americans to file their taxes on a postcard," putting the $483 billion paid for tax prep in America back in the pockets of Americans. We are not talking pocket change here.

Perry's plan eliminates tax on Social Security benefits, capital gains and dividends. All are eminently doable in the context of Perry's plan to cut federal spending. A balanced budget is foreseen by the year 2020. Hallelujah. That would be new!

And we get there by doing something new: growing the economy to pay off the staggering debt heaped upon us by politicians bent on redistributing wealth instead of creating it and by capping federal spending to 18 percent of GDP. Federal spending in 2010 was 24 percent of GDP and it grows every year. My arithmetic shows Perry's plan as reducing spending by 25 percent, a doable tapering, while a growing spurt relieves what ails the nation.

Perry's plan also eliminates bailouts, pork-barrel earmarks, the death tax, and Washington's use of Social Security trust funds for its own purposes.

And, an amendment to the Constitution would eliminate anything but a balanced budget. Just like the constitutional requirements of Germany and Switzerland, these United States can bring balance to the nation's budget by the highest law of the land if we really want it that way. Rick Perry wants it that way and so do I. Don't you?

It goes without saying specifically that Perry's plan eliminates the overspending, over-regulating, over-restriction, overtaxing, and over-entitlement outlays that cut the gut out of American productivity and former prosperity. Americans will once again have the freedom to be all they can be.

Read Perry's inspirational economic plan in his own words here as posted by the Wall Street Journal. Try it. There's nothing not to like.