One of Scott’s ideas on income taxes, however, is the kind of thing that would be politically toxic if many candidates ran on it: ​​“All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”

Many commentators have made the case that Scott’s proposal echoes Mitt Romney’s comments in 2012 about the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay income taxes. (As Tim Carney notes, even those who don’t pay income taxes still pay many thousands of dollars in Social Security/Medicare taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and gas taxes.) Romney’s secretly recorded comments to a group of donors (foolishly) seemed to write off many voters who can and do vote for Republicans, and Scott doesn’t do that. But proposing to actually raise the taxes of 100 million Americans is probably much worse politics.

With that said, I doubt that Scott’s eleven-point plan — or even his boneheaded tax proposal — will matter in November. No one thinks of Rick Scott as the face of the Republican Party. The majority of Americans do not even know who he is. There is not a single Republican candidate in America who is afraid of saying — or would pay a price for saying — that he disagrees with Rick Scott about income taxes. What’s most important: There isn’t a chance his proposal would ever be turned into legislation that has a chance of passing.