Breaking: Failed Presidential candidate and sexual harasser, Herman Cain is being considered by the White House Squatter to be appointed as a member of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Cain, 73, was in the White House on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter. Two seats on the Fed board are vacant, but nominating Cain raises the prospect of a Senate confirmation hearing focused on the sexual harassment and infidelity accusations that ended his presidential campaign…
Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza Inc. and an ordained Baptist minister, attracted national attention when he turned a forum on health care reform into a debate with President Bill Clinton in 1994.
Before his campaign tanked, Cain was known for his “Nine, Nine, Nine” tax plan. This proposed a rate of nine per cent for personal, corporate and sales tax rates. In 2011, Amanda Terkel discovered that his idea might have come from the video game, “SimCity 4.”
Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 — which was released in 2003 — were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. (That is, of course, if you didn’t use the cheat codes to get unlimited money and avoid taxes altogether.)
There has been all sorts of speculation about where Cain came up with the idea for his catchy plan — Unnamed economic advisers? A clever marketing promotion pulled from the pizza industry? — but beyond a few hardcore gamers in the comments sections of blogs, few have looked to SimCity, the land where there’s a “God mode.”
The game inventor thought this was just a dandy idea.
“We encourage politicians to continue to look to innovative games like SimCity for inspiration for social and economic change,” said Katsarelis. “While we at Maxis and Electronic Arts do not endorse any political candidates or their platforms, it’s interesting to see GOP candidate Herman Cain propose a simplified tax system like one we designed for the video game SimCity 4.”
Adopting such a simple tax structure, Katsarelis said, would allow fantasy political leaders to focus their energy on infrastructure and national security. “Our game design team thought that an easy to understand taxation system would allow players to focus on building their cities and have fun thwarting giant lizard attacks, rather than be buried by overly complex financial systems.”
Yeah. Forget complex economics. We have a crisis of thwarting giant lizard attacks.
Then, there were the sexual harassment suits against him, that came before the Me Too era. He was forced out of the race, he claimed, by “marital infidelity” issues. Forget about the fact that he paid settlements on the claims.
But oh, the memories, the memories…
So, bring him on. The congressional hearings should be a blast.