Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor at Boston University and a onetime senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, is angling for the nomination of the Americans Elect party. To get there, he first needs 50,000 support clicks at the new party’s website to qualify for the online primary.
Kotlikoff said that will be a “hurdle,” but “I think I’m the only who is really serious in terms of having plans to fix the country.”
And in an ode to his mantra that he’s not about party affiliation, he’s offering the Purple Plans to get the economy back on track.
“They’re all simple plans,” Kotlikoff said. “Some of them have been endorsed by large numbers of very prominent people.” They’ve also been in the making long before he threw his hat into the 2012 ring, involving “decades” of thought, number-crunching, and discussions with other economists, he added.
For example, his Purple Tax Plan replaces the federal personal and corporate income taxes as well as the estate and gift tax with a broad-based, low-rate, progressive consumption tax and a low-rate, progressive inheritance tax. It nixes annual tax returns and includes a monthly payment, based on household size, to ensure that those living at or below the poverty line pay no tax, on net, on their consumption. The sales tax rate would be 17.5 percent, with 15 cents of every dollar going toward taxes and 85 cents for consumption.
In a “Win the Future,” “America Built to Last” campaign season, Kotlikoff said his slogan — and the basis of his platform — is “Our Kids are Us.”
“The country’s essentially bankrupt at this point,” he said. “The most important thing to the public is their kids.”
His Purple Plans extend to the financial sector, Social Security, energy, “generational balance,” and health care — providing universal coverage and turning Medicare into a voucher-based system.
“Politicians have left our kids with a terrible fiscal problem,” Kotlikoff said. “They don’t seem to understand how to fix things. They seem to know how to make things worse.”
Even worse than EU bailout icon Greece, he argued, when you take into account future obligations such as entitlements and defense spending as total debt.
Kotlikoff faces a challenge from former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, a campaign-finance reform advocate who abandoned his quest for the Republican Party nomination last week and turned his hopes to an Americans Elect ticket.
