Average annual corporate profits for 2008, 2009, and 2010 were $1.47 trillion.
The average annual corporate tax paid on those profits was $331 billion for an average annual corporate tax rate of 22.5 percent.
How Herman Cain thinks he can lower the rate to 9 percent and still have enough revenue in combination with a 9 percent income tax rate and a 9 percent national sales tax rate is beyond me.
In 2008, those 9 percent rates would have yielded a mere $112 billion in corporate taxes (instead of the $309 billion actually collected), $400 billion in sales taxes, and $765 billion in income taxes, or $1.223 trillion short of the $2.5 trillion actually collected by the federal government.
If Cain leaves social insurance taxes in place, which would make it a 9997.65 Plan, not a 999 Plan, the $900 billion collected in 2008 in FICA taxes would still have left him $323 billion short of actual revenue collected in 2008.
See the corporate profits data in Table 11 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here:
