Even with his run-ins with Trump and Cruz in the last debate, Cruz is in reasonably good shape. He seems to be the first choice among white evangelicals and is making inroads among nonevangelical conservatives who feel estranged from the Republican Party’s congressional leaders. That isn’t a bad base of support from which to pursue the nomination. I don’t think his flip-flops on immigration will hurt him as much as Rubio hopes. When it came down to it, Rubio voted with the Republican lobbyist and donor classes, while Cruz sided with the majority of his party’s voters. You can call them both sellouts, but Cruz had the sense to sell out to the voters rather than the lobbyists. Cruz needs some work appealing to Republican-leaning, working-class whites, but he might figure that out. What I don’t understand is Cruz’s support for a VAT.

What is the political angle here? Is even one person supporting Cruz on the basis of a 16 percent hidden consumption tax? Cruz’s support is giving Rubio and Trump a weapon that they could not have built for themselves.

I’m not sure that Cruz’s defenses that his plan would allow for the abolition of the IRS, or that his plan would do away with a whole host of taxes will hold up under scrutiny in the GOP contest. They definitely won’t hold up in the general election with a hostile media. What is Cruz’s next line of defense?

I suppose that he could plausibly argue that, under a dynamic analysis, his plan would leader to far higher job growth combined with substantially higher income for every decile from the bottom to the top. I’d like to believe he could make that work. On the other hand, I don’t think that he will be able to use doublespeak to talk his way out of what looks to me like a hidden tax increase on Social Security benefits.

Don’t get me wrong. I want more jobs and higher earnings for those in the lower half of the income distribution (among others.) Ramesh Ponnuru has suggested a way in which Cruz’s plan could be changed so that the impact of his value-added tax would be more clear to workers – and thereby reduce the possibility of stealth tax increases. I would like to believe that Cruz could fight and win the campaign based on the dynamic analysis of his plan. I just don’t bet on it. His VAT plan could kill his campaign all by itself.

Cruz would be better off with something that was less radical and that directed more of its tax relief (on a static basis) to families in the middle of the income distribution.