Right now - Newt Gingrich is the man most Republicans actually want to be President of the United States.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released this week gives Newt a 17-point lead over Mitt Romney.

So - if you really want to get at the heart of what direction Republican voters want to take this country - then what you need to look at carefully is the Republican front-runner's economic plan, right?

Luckily - the Center for American Progress did just that - and today the results are in...Newt Gingrich's economic plan - which is very similar to all the other Republicans' plans - would officially turn American into a banana republic.

Gingrich's plan is very, very simple - it's just a 15% flat tax.

So whether you make 25,000 bucks a year - or 25 million bucks a year - you pay the same tax rate - just 15%.

Despite the fact that American corporations currently pay the second least amount of taxes in the developed world - Newt also wants to give them a massive tax cut too - dropping the corporate tax rate from 35% to 12.5% without closing a SINGLE corporate tax loophole.

And in a special nod to people like Mitt Romney who make their money sitting on their butts around the pool collecting dividend checks - or the Hilton sisters who've inherited all their money from their parents - Newt completely eliminates the capital gains tax which is currently 15% - and scraps the estate tax altogether.

Under Newt's plan - Mitt Romney - who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars and earns additional millions a year from his investments - would pay ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in taxes.

But that's not all...let's just take a look at these charts:

This is actually some extraordinary stuff. Under Newt's plan - millionaires - people making more than a million dollars - are actually going to make less than people making $75-100,000, $50-75,000, $40-50,000. Look at this. Millionaires make the least,millionaires would pay a lower overall tax rate than all middle-class Americans [chart 1]:

Source: Center for American Progress

This is, and Gingrich would give a tax cut to 12 times, under Newt's plan millionaires would receive an average of a $600,000 tax cut. Under Newt's plan - millionaires would receive on average a $600,000 tax cut [chart 2]. This is the tax cut [left hand column], this is the amount the average American makes [right hand column].

Newt's plan would amount to an $850 billion a year tax cut - but guess who'd be getting most of that money. The richest 1% are going to get 50% of it, the next 4% are going to get 16% of it, and about a third of it is going to come, mostly from the top of the bottom 95% [chart 3].

Under Newt's plan - the tax rate for the top 1% would fall to its lowest level in modern history [chart 6, starting from left]. This is under Reagan, this is under Bush, this is under Clinton, this is under Bush II, and this is under Gingrich. Pretty amazing.

In fact - Gingrich's tax cut for millionaires would cost our nation $360 billion a year [chart 7]. This is how much his tax cut would cost [left hand column], how much it would add to the debt. This is the total cost of Medicaid [middle hand column]. Now his tax cut is going to cost us more than Medicaid cost us. It would cost more than Veterans benefits, food stamps and elementary & secondary education, National Institutes of Health and the highway repair and reconstruction [right hand column].

And here's the kicker...you know how Republicans can't say more than two words without screaming about the debt - well here's what Newt's massive tax cuts for millionaires would do to our debt [chart 9]. Right now it's 67% of GDP, by the year 2030 it will be 142% of GDP. Our debt would explode as the result of Newt's ideas.

So this is the vision for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is pretty much identical to Ronald Reagan's ideas, when Reagan dropped the top tax rate on 1 percent millionaires from 74 percent to 28 percent, and as a result threw us into a recession, gave us 11 percent unemployment, crashed the S&L banks, and almost tripled our national debt.

And we still pretty much have Reagan's tax rates, which for thirty years have ensured that millionaires and billionaires don't pay the cost of building and running the nation that made them so wealthy.

This is what they want to do - at a time when the middle class is disappearing, with 1-in-2 Americans living in poverty or in low-income households as we heard today from the Census Bureau - at a time when wealth inequality is at levels unseen since the Great Depression - at a time when student loan debt is topping a trillion bucks - this is the vision that the Republicans have for America.

We can't let it happen.

If Newt Gingrich - or any other Republican for that matter - gets a chance to enact this radical vision of rule by the rich - then it will be the death of the middle class in America as we know it.

And that, my friends, is the death of America as we know it.

And because all the Republicans pretty much agree with Newt, this is the choice we're all going to face next November, regardless of who is the Republican nominee.

A lot of us - myself included - may be disappointed with Democrats - but there's absolutely no way we can let the 1 percent oligarchs who are banking on one of these Republican lapdogs win the White House.

One of those lapdogs who wants to complete the transformation of America that was started 30 years ago by Ronald Reagan - turning the last of our middle class into the working poor.

We can't let it happen.

Occupy something!

That's The Big Picture.