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Print Thursday, October 13, 2011 11:34 AM EDT Why Herman Cain's Simplicity Formula is Winning By David Magee As some economists and critics debate the merits of the Herman Cain "999" tax plan, with some saying the solution is not as simple is scrapping the tax code in favor of such a straightline formula, many Republican voters see it differently. It's a major reason why Cain, of Atlanta, has surged to the top of at least one recent poll besting former frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Romney, of course, joins the critics in suggesting that Cain's plan is too simplistic. While Cain harps upon the necessity of throwing out the extensive U.S. tax code to go with his 999 plan which would eliminate all taxes in favor of a nine percent income tax, a nine percent corporate tax and a new nine percent national sales tax, Romney promotes his 59point economic plan as Cain keeps gaining momentum in polls. Some, like Romney, don't seem to understand this simplistic power that Cain is developing with the voters sending him to the top of the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that placed him in the lead with 27 percent support compared to Romney at 23 percent and Perry at 16 percent. But all we have to do to understand why Cain's simple message is resonating while Romney's is not is to look at history, and take a cue from another well known Southerner the late author William Faulkner. Well known for his complex writing style that pushed readers from around the world to understand and grapple with the social views and structure including racism, Faulkner was at one time a writer of a much simpler tone. He was a Hollywood screenwriter, and his first novels were written in a more mainstream commercial voice. But the genius of Faulkner, who lived in North Mississippi in an era of racial oppression, was his ability to understand that society as a whole in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those who lived around him, were seeing the world as too blackandwhite. And not just in terms of race. The society at that time rarely considered complexity, it was either this way or that way black and white. So Faulkner exposed the world to complex subjects like racism and how one neighbor viewed another through some of the most complex writing the world had arguably seen. It was just the right voice for just the right times. Faulkner won a Nobel Prize, even though many didn't understand it at the time. Now consider Cain, who has boiled America's economic problem down to his simple plan 999. Some say it is a solution. Some say it is a slogan. The reality is that it's both, a solution and a slogan. We'll not debate the merits of the plan here. That's for others. But we will look at why Cain's message has sent him to the top of at least one major GOP presidential race poll. The world we live in today is no longer black and white like it was before. It's