Candidate Thompson

Today we'll examine a Republican candidate for president, former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn), who is currently polling in Iowa at 15%, ahead of Rudy Giuliani and behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.
The issues Thompson has highlighted in his campaign include a continuation of George Bush's tax cut policies.
Similar to the President's, Thompson's tax plan focuses
on corporate tax rates and small businesses. A central element of the plan involves letting "taxpayers [have] the option of remaining under the current, complex tax code or opting for a simplified, flat tax code."
Of course, this would have the effect--intended or otherwise--of fracturing and thus destroying the existing tax structure (while avoiding an unpopular national debate). Not detailed is where the federal budget will be cut to pay for his tax policy, beyond saying he would target (in the words his campaign's policy director, Mark Esper) "waste, fraud and abuse."
However, Citizens Against Government Waste, identified only $13.2 billion in "pork" for fiscal year 2007, a number clearly insufficient to pay for his proposed cuts.
A second way Thompson would control spending is on Social Security. He advocates a popular Republican plan that would index benefits to price growth instead of wage growth. In the most recent Republican debate, Thompson said, "the indexing of benefits in the future, from wages to prices, [would let] those retiring in the future get the same benefits in real dollars as those retiring now, but not more."
But according to the Urban Institute "since prices generally grow more slowly than wages, price indexing would reduce benefits for most new retirees by about 30 percent by 2050, compared to current law . . . [and] would significantly reduce Social Security's role in providing retirement security for middle-income workers."
How Thompson as president would sell this to an electorate who, when faced with a 30% drop in benefits, would be understandably enraged is unclear.
But he owes it to the voters to explicitly make clear the significant reduction in benefits his plan would entail.