Herman Cain has risen to the top of the heap in the republican field because of his simplified tax plan. He proposes a 9% income tax, a 9% sales tax, and a 9% corporate tax with no loopholes. This simplified plan is wildly popular because the current tax code is absurdly complex and impossible to follow. Herman Cain is a businessman and it shows.

In contrast, the current tax code was written by a bunch of lawyers who put in special provisions to accommodate their campaign contributors. So, it’s not surprising that the tax code has turned out the way it has. Only a lawyer would have the time or desire to pour tediously over insignificant details in a verbose documents; the rest of us have lives to live and businesses to run. That explains much of the disconnect between most people and politics.

We have three branches of government and all three of them are run by people who come largely from one single profession: lawyers. Consider these recent presidential candidates: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and John Edwards. Yes, these are all democrats, and but they were all lawyers too (the republican party is slightly better).

In fact, the only recent democrat that came close to the White House and wasn’t a lawyer is Al Gore (he dropped out of law school to go straight into politics). Considering that all of those candidates served in the legislature, one can imagine how much that branch is controlled by lawyers as well. Of course, it goes without saying that the judicial branch is strictly lawyers. So, there it is: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial; our three branches of government are run by people from one profession.

Lawyers are used to arguing over minutiae for days on end. They believe the world changes based on a few insignificant words on a page. Is it any wonder that they think that can tweak the economy into shape by adding more and more regulations? Could we expect anything more from them than the mounds of printed paper that they churn out year after year?

Lawyers create laws to control our lives and put them into a context that they can understand: minute, tedious, and trivial. In contrast, Herman Cain has proposed a tax code to that is designed to solve our economic problems. He’s a mathematician, computer scientist, and a CEO. Herman Cain has never been a politician or a lawyer, and he probably wonders why politicians don’t see it. The rest of us wonder too.

Cain’s tax plan recently came under attack from his republican opponents, even though some thanked him for starting the discussion. Michele Bachmann, who was also a lawyer, claimed that his sales tax could go from 9% to something much higher because that’s what happened to the income tax.

First, let me say that I like Bachmann, and I would like to see her as Cain’s VP. However, claiming that we can’t do anything with the tax code because it could lead to higher taxes is simply foolish. Yes, we had higher income taxes (up to 94% at one time) because the public allowed it. The taxes were lowered when the public demanded it. The only protection against high taxation is the public throwing the bums out, and the surest protection against raising taxes is a simplified tax code.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. After all the griping about Cain’s “unworkable” tax plan, Rick Perry recently announced that he is coming out with his own flat tax proposal to mimic Cain’s 9-9-9 plan. Only among politicians could a single, flat tax rate be so strange that requires a mathematician propose it. Thankfully, we have Herman Cain.