8 GOP Primary Moments That Would Make Jesus Weep

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Since this past Christmas season coincided with the final campaign push before the Iowa caucus, every Republican candidate for president worked extra hard to out-pander one another in claiming that God is supportive of his or her particular flat-tax plan.

But you have to wonder watching some of the Republican debates and press conferences if the GOP hopefuls have actually read the New Testament. Say what you will about Jesus, but he didn’t seem like the sort of guy who would support showering rich people with tax cuts, gutting social programs for the poor and middle-class, or launching multiple wars with Middle Eastern countries. Yet these are the sorts of things that his purported acolytes have been endorsing throughout the year, all the while claiming to be Jesus’ number-one fan in the whole world.

In this article we’ll tackle the five most cringe-inducing moments of the GOP primary, where candidates and their supporters have wantonly broken the Lord’s Commandments with seemingly gleeful abandon.

1. Candidates fall all over themselves to kiss the asses of rich people and trash the downtrodden.

Jesus once said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Well, the Republicans must want to compensate for this by making rich peoples’ time on Earth as heavenly as possible through a wonderful blend of tax cuts and blatant ass-kissing.

The entire Republican economic philosophy can basically be boiled down thusly: Rich people are magical wealth-creating leprechaun fairies who sprinkle their sparkle dust over all of us worthless dirtbags to bless us with the gift of employment. But if any nasty populist ever says anything relatively nasty about rich people, they will vanish from the realm and take their magical job-creating powers with them and none of us will ever work or have food to eat ever again.

You can see this pretty clearly when you look at the way Rick Perry has been pushing Texas’ tax system as a shining model for the rest of the nation. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy [PDF] has shown, Texas’ regressive tax system ensures that the poorest 20% of its citizens typically pay more than four times in state and local taxes as a percentage of their overall income than the wealthiest 1% of Texans. How can this be, you ask? Well, Texas relies heavily on sales and excise taxes to fill its coffers, meaning that poorer people pay a much larger share of their income in taxes since a much larger share of their income goes toward consumption.

Nonetheless, Perry has described this system as “a tax policy in place that allowed for our job creators to not be burdened, still delivering the services that the people desire in the state of Texas.” Well, yeah, if by “services” you mean a pathetic social safety net that leaves more than one quarter of the population without health insurance, I guess that’s good.

Perry wasn’t alone in giving a big, sloppy kiss to the rich. Herman Cain’s infamous 9-9-9 tax plan would have slashed the income tax to 9% while at the same time implementing a 9% national sales tax that would take a huge chunk out of Americans in the lower income brackets while at the same time saving “a taxpayer in the top 0.1% who makes more than $2.7 million” an average of $1.4 million a year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Speaking of Cain, he also wins the award for the most obnoxious class-warfare statement of the entire campaign when he said that “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” He also went on to say that it was foolish to protest the greed and corruption on Wall Street since Wall Street bankers are “the ones who create the jobs.”