If you ever want to know how STUPID Republicans are when it comes to economics, you don t need to look back over the decades of Republican presidents and their associated financial disasters. All you need to do is find any potential Republican presidential candidate, and examine their tax plan.2016 s crop of candidates does not fail in this. Every single one of them that has come out with a plan has been universally mocked by legitimate economic scholars that use real math because their plans are more unrealistic than a stop-motion monster movie.The latest member of the idiot village to have his tax fantasy completely trashed is Ted Cruz. His  plan  reads like something a failed James Bond villain would try to do in order to destroy the U.S. economy.Here are some of the features included in Cruz s plan.A 10 percent flat income tax rate:Ted wants to replace our seven different tax brackets with one single tax rate of 10 percent. A flat tax always favors the wealthy while hurting the poor. To put it simply, the poor can t afford to have taxes deducted from their income like the rich can. When you pay 10 percent of 1 million dollars you have $900k remaining and you aren t starving. When you pay 10 percent of $15k you re left with $13.5k and you are starving worse because you were already starving at $15k. Don t forget, we would probably have to cut food stamps and other social safety nets because there is no money for them. Add into that the fact you are paying in taxes equal to about what a single individual would get in food stamps per year, while not actually getting food stamps.Elimination of many major taxes:Cruz wants to remove the estate tax (misclassified as a  death tax  by Republicans), alternative minimum tax, payroll tax, corporate taxes, and the Medicare surtax imposed by the Affordable Care Act. If you want a way to underfund the U.S. government to where it could cause a global financial crisis, this would be one of the ways to do it.Impose a VAT tax on businesses:Despite Cruz denying strongly that he is not in favor of a VAT tax, his business tax proposal is exactly that. The Tax Policy Center calls it that, so that s what we are calling it as well and the fact he is afraid to call it what it is shows the absurdity of his plan. A VAT tax will likely reduce wages because employers will no longer be able to deduct the cost of wages from their taxes. This will force employers to pay even less than they are currently. A good way to crush an economy is to hurt the buying power of the consumer base and this would be one of the most efficient ways to do it.Virtually nothing in this plan seems to be realistically paid for:Another very standard feature of Cruz s plan is that it would explode our federal deficit and debt by amazing levels. Estimates put it at over $20 trillion in 2 decades (8.6 in the first decade, 12 in the second). Republicans can t stop complaining about how President Obama has exploded our debt since he had to have the Bush years  numbers on his books. However, he hasn t even come close to the costs Cruz would impose on the nation. It would make us unable to afford functional government.Most tax savings would go to the top 0.1 percent of filers: Top money-looters (I refuse to call them  earners ) would get a post-tax income boost of $2 million   approximately a 29 percent increase. Middle-income people would get an average of about $1,800   coming in at around a 3.2 percent increase, and lowest income filers would get an average of 0.4 percent of their income, or around $46. To put it more simply, if you are ultra wealthy, you could buy several extra middle-class homes per year just to pass the time. If you are poor you could buy about 60 percent of one McDonald s cheeseburger per week, per year with your savings.There s no other word to describe this besides insane, because it s the same thing from every Republican candidate every year, with them expecting different results every time. Democrats MUST vote in large numbers in November. We literally can t afford not to.Featured image from Flickr