A 9-9-9 Plan for Your Own Finances in 2027

In 2011, Herman Cain made "9-9-9" famous with a simple tax plan. The odds of it ever becoming law were admittedly low, and even if he'd somehow reached the White House, any version of any portion of it that would have ever passed would have looked different after the usual fight and compromise.

I am not even certain, from a practical standpoint, that his plan could even have been implemented on such simplistic terms anyway. Government is complex.

Still, the core idea—three clear, specific targets that reinforce each other—stuck with me. Looking back from now, in late 2026, after the sharp inflation spike under Biden that hit levels we hadn't seen since the Carter years, and with prices still higher and stickier than most of us would like, that same simplicity feels useful again. Not for Washington. But for the kitchen table.

The personal version is straightforward: pick three numbers and work them at the same time. Increase what you earn by a set percentage. Cut what you spend by a set percentage. Knock down your debt by a set percentage. The exact figures don't have to be nine. What matters is that whatever number you decide on is specific enough, and useful enough to force real decisions instead of vague hopes.

Take a 2-2-2 version as an example. First, the earning side. A 2 percent raise on a $50,000 job is $1,000 a year, or roughly $80 a month before taxes. That can come from a formal raise, overtime, a side job, or simply negotiating better. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It just has to be deliberate. Once that extra money is real, the next choice is where it goes.

Second, the spending side. Cutting 2 percent means looking at the monthly total and finding that amount to remove or redirect. On a $4,000 monthly budget, that's $80. It might mean one fewer takeout order, dropping a subscription you barely use, or shopping the sale rack instead of full price on a couple items. The point isn't to live on rice and beans. It's to identify the leaks and plug them so the money stops disappearing.

Third, the debt side. Tackling 2 percent more of your debt than you already are means calculating the current balance and adding that extra slice to your payments. If you owe $10,000 and are already paying the minimum, an additional 2 percent is $200 over the course of a year, or about $17 a month. That doesn't sound like much until you notice how the other two pieces feed it. The $80 from the raise and the $80 you stopped spending can go straight toward that debt payment.

Suddenly, the extra 2 percent is covered without new money from thin air. Interest drops a little each month. The principal falls faster. Next year the same 2 percent of a smaller balance is easier to hit, and you can aim higher or shift some of the freed-up cash elsewhere.

The three pieces work together. Higher earnings give you more to work with. Lower spending keeps more of it. Faster debt reduction lowers the interest that was quietly eating the difference. None of them has to be heroic on its own. Together they compound because each one makes the others more possible.

Savings belongs in the picture eventually. Once the debt is smaller and the monthly outflow is tighter, the same discipline can redirect those dollars into an emergency fund or longer-term savings. But the sequence usually matters. If high spending and high interest debt are still draining you, extra money tends to vanish before it can accumulate. You have to fix what's pulling you backwards first. Then the same specific targets start building something instead of just stopping the bleed.

In 2026, and heading into 2027, after several years of elevated prices and tighter budgets for a lot of households, the temptation is to treat the whole situation as something that just happens to you. The 2-2-2 approach (or 3-3-3 or 1-1-1) is a way to push back with numbers you can actually measure and adjust. The percentages you choose are less important than refusing the zero option or sliding backward.

Pick the targets. Track them for a few months. See how the pieces start supporting each other. Herman Cain may never have sat in the Oval Office. His idea may never have worked in the actual government. But his plan still left a legacy.

Not for the country. But for us. Right here in 2026 and beyond. A plan like his is so simple, it actually works.

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© 2026 Jim Bauer/The Springboard. All rights reserved.

Obama’s Stump Speech Says Less Than It Leaves Out

You ever wonder if some people are actually paying attention to what's going on? Obama's clearly the face of the Democratic party now, which makes sense on some level. Clinton's aging out of relevance, and even for hardcore Democrats, Biden was never that popular.

So, he's the obvious figurehead, out on the trail pumping up Democratic candidates.

But it's what he's saying that should get attention. The same old "affordability" pitch. And who he's supporting—Democrats, sure, that tracks. But Abdul El Sayed? And coming out for Ilhan Omar, Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, or whatever her real name is, in her legal troubles? There's some real amnesia happening here, which, let's be honest, isn't new.

Is inflation still a problem? Yeah. It's stubborn. No one's denying that. The point is, we're only talking about it at all because Biden drove it to levels we hadn't seen since Carter. If that hadn't happened, it wouldn't even be a conversation. Calling Trump out for inflation without owning how we got here is absurd.

And there's the clear witch hunts against Trump before the 2024 election. Sure, sure—that wasn't a witch hunt, right? Just justice in action. Anyone paying attention knows it was about a lot more than that.

Even before that it was all the other stuff: IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, spying on Trump Tower, the Russia Collusion hoax.

As I have said before, when the amnesia card gets played, the hope is that everyone else experiences amnesia right alongside them.

"This is our chance to rein in some of the foolishness of this administration," Obama told supporters. Does he just completely dismiss the foolishness of the Biden administration? The border ran wild with floods of illegals—something even pre-presidency Obama wouldn't have sided with, and something he never pushed while he was in the White House.

And what about flying LGBTQ+ flags on the front of the White House, advocating for men in women's sports, crazy vaccine mandates for federal workers and the military, or the clear coverup of Biden's mental decline?

I mean, there are even serious questions about who was actually running the show during Biden's term. Was it Kamala? His staff? Or was it Obama himself? That's a very real possibility. Who wrote the documents the autopen was signing?

Talk about foolishness. The entire Biden presidency was nothing short of a total disaster, and frankly, one of the scariest stretches in our history.

I know this gets tossed around nearly every presidential cycle—that if "this guy" wins, that's it for America. We're cooked forever. But I think we seriously dodged a bullet with Kamala Harris. If the media machine and the courts had finished the job Democrats were desperately trying to do—get Trump off the ballot—we'd be living a real nightmare right now.

What people need to be paying attention to isn't what Obama or anyone else stumping for power is saying. It's what they're not saying. The things they're conveniently leaving out. The lack of ownership for problems they didn't solve—or more importantly, the ones they created that we're living with now.

It's their lack of concern over what's happening inside their own party, things they should actually be railing against or trying to change. The radical calls for socialism—something that's never worked anywhere it's been tried. The utter craziness of diminishing womanhood or making a mockery of it by claiming men can get pregnant.

And yes, supporting people like Ilhan Omar or Abdul El Sayed. People that don't even sound like Americans. I'm not talking about their names. I'm talking about the things they actually say. Supporting their clear hatred for America and American values, or the principles that founded and shaped this nation.

Whatever Democrats ever stood for, it's a far cry from what they stand for now, and that's the part that people need to pay close attention to. They want to fundamentally change America. They want to change the culture, the foundational premise of what we stand for, and it seems clear they want to turn this country into a place not that unlike all the other places so many people flee.

For all the chaos anyone feels about the Trump administration, what the current Democratic leadership is advocating and proposing is far worse. The fact is, we're at a critical crossroads with this midterm election.

California has an important governor's race. Minnesota needs a sea change too. Michigan's a disaster. Illinois is a mess. New York City has lost its mind. People have to acknowledge the disasters left in the Democratic wake over the past decade or so. Sanctuary cities and states, tax money scandals simply glossed over, tampons in boy's rooms, wide-open borders—it's just madness.

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© 2026 Jim Bauer/The Springboard. All rights reserved.

The Tell: Trump’s Cases vs. Ilhan Omar

Tells happen when two events line up but draw opposite reactions. The Ilhan Omar investigation is a clear example. Federal agents raided her home and removed documents and other items as evidence. Potential crimes are being alleged, and we'll see where that evidence leads.

How does this differ from what happened to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago? Or from any of the other investigations and court cases brought against him?

When those hit, right in the middle of an election while Trump was the clear frontrunner, no one on the left came out and said this was wrong or political warfare. It was simply framed as no one being above the law. If he did something wrong, his position didn't matter.

Indicting a former president who then became a candidate was unprecedented. So, the question has to be asked: if Trump had never run for a second term, would any of these cases ever have been brought? The clear answer is no. They would not have.

This was a clear attempt to sway public opinion—or best case for them, find a way to keep Trump off the ballot entirely.

But if the real conviction was that no one is above the law—and that who you are shouldn't matter if you've done something wrong—then why are so many on the left now calling the Ilhan Omar investigation the same thing we on the right called out when Trump was being dragged through the legal system?

Why were we wrong then, and they're right now?

Because the only real difference, outside of whatever the actual merits turn out to be, is which party is being targeted.

I've said all along that people should be held accountable—especially elected officials and anyone we put into positions of power. How they conduct themselves can affect all of us.

That said, the cases against Trump, and the "felony conviction," still deserve real scrutiny. Plenty of lawyers who aren't Trump supporters had serious questions about what laws he actually broke. Alan Dershowitz called it the worst legal basis for a conviction he'd seen in 60 years. Even Judge Judy, who isn't a Trump supporter, threw her hands up and asked what the hell he did that was illegal.

I'm not bringing this up to dismiss the convictions or defend Trump. I'm pointing it out because it helps explain why his situation may have been motivated differently. The question of whether these cases would have been brought if he hadn't run again still matters. So does the fact that so many legal observers said it wasn't even clear a law had been broken. Shouldn't that have been clear? The fact that it wasn't suggests the cases may well have been politically motivated.

But of course, that brings us back to the tell. How did the left react to Trump's cases and conviction? According to them it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. They accepted the outcome. In nearly every conversation about Trump, they still remind you he's a convicted felon in the White House.

How is Trump's case the right thing to do, but Ilhan Omar's is political weaponization of the justice system? And if her case leads to a conviction, how much does anyone want to bet the left will claim the courts got it wrong and you can't trust the outcome?

So, which is it? Hold everyone accountable or does it depend? Is the court only right when it hits the right target?

To me the tell is that some people aren't really thinking it through. They're hoping for outcomes that fit the preferred narrative. It tells me some people never seriously considered the evidence in Trump's case. They were simply satisfied with the result because it matched what they wanted.

I don't know if Ilhan Omar is guilty of anything. Based on what's public, there are serious questions. I also can't call her case entirely politically motivated—it's been reported that parts of it started under Biden.

What I do know is that once political motivations start filtering verdicts, the truth gets distorted. The same people who treated the court's findings in Trump's case as gospel will find fault with any conviction of Ilhan Omar if one comes.

You can't have it both ways. And if that turns out to be the reaction, then the law was never the thing they were actually interested in.

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© 2026 Jim Bauer/The Springboard. All rights reserved.

Would Broadcasting Nidal Hasan’s Execution Change Anything?

Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who gunned down 13 people at Ford Hood, should face a firing squad as President Trump has urged. Whether that execution should be broadcast is the part I'm still unsure about.

The real question is whether it's necessary. What does the public gain from seeing it? Hasan's crime was beyond heinous. He broke his allegiance to the United States, gunned down fellow soldiers, and carried out a clear act of terrorism that, given what he claimed to be fighting for, can reasonably even be viewed as an act of war.

Too many people have lost the plot on what it means to be American. The right to disagree with the country—loudly, publicly, even harshly—is one of the things that separates us from the regimes we oppose. That right, though, is not unlimited. It ends where allegiance ends.

Hasan didn't disagree. He switched sides and opened fire on his fellow countrymen sworn to protect the constitution and our fundamental freedoms. The question is whether putting his execution on display makes that line clearer to anyone who has blurred it, or whether it just becomes another spectacle that changes nothing.

That would be the point, right? To show the public what happens when certain lines are crossed—not just tell them the consequences but put them front and center.

That's how it worked in the Old West. Public executions were common for serious crimes because the goal was deterrence through visible consequences, and to make clear that laws existed and would be enforced when broken. Children were often brought along on the theory that seeing it firsthand left a deeper mark than simply hearing about it.

Granted, it was a different time. Enforcing the law was far harder, and authority itself was less established—you had to work harder to make it stick.

It was also a different country. People were different. Sentiments were different.

The public largely accepted that certain lines carried real consequences. Sure, sympathies for the condemned existed, but it rarely overrode the sentence itself or turned the crime itself into a lesser concern.

That restraint is harder to find now.

We have people openly celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk or treating Christa Pike's torture-murder or Lindsay Clancy's killing of her own children as occasions for primary sympathy directed at the perpetrators.

We live in an era of the great, "But..."

The expectation that some acts and their consequences forfeit sympathy, and the public at large will enforce the forfeit, has faded for too many.

Does broadcasting Nidal Hasan's execution offer any kind of reset? If it doesn't—if it only fans the flames of the current outcry—then what, exactly, would be the point?

I am not saying don't do it. I'm asking why do it.

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© 2026 Jim Bauer/The Springboard. All rights reserved.

Alan Greenspan Died of What???

Sometimes even the gloomier headlines land a little funny. Take the latest one about former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who passed away on June 22nd.

"Alan Greenspan, former Fed Reserve chair dies, with cause of death revealed."

"Cause of death revealed"—as if we were all waiting for some shocking twist. The article goes on to say he died from complications of Parkinson's disease. Sure. But honestly, every disease kills you through "complications." If diseases had a job description, that would be it.

Rule #1: Complicate one's ability to continue living.

By their very nature, complications are the part that actually does you in. Heart disease? One of the complications is that your heart stops. COPD or emphysema? A key complication is that you stop breathing. It's not exactly a mystery.

The part, in this case, that matters more is the fact that Alan Greenspan was 100 years old. Parkinson's or not, few people are cracking triple digits and making a run into overtime. At that age you could trip over a throw pillow and that would be your "cause of death revealed."

We already knew he had Parkinson's. We also knew he was a very old man. So, his passing isn't shocking, and it certainly doesn't require a dramatic headline tease.

Perhaps if someone had never heard of Alan Greenspan, the headline might be more informative. It's certainly a headline worthy of someone much younger who suddenly dies. When that happens, out of pure curiosity, we want to know.

A cleaner and more honest headline would have been: "Alan Greenspan, former Fed Reserve chair, dies at 100."

Then, inside the article, mention the Parkinson's diagnosis, and trust readers to connect the dots. He was a centenarian with a serious illness, and eventually biology does was biology does. 

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© 2026 Jim Bauer