If Herman Cain's 999 plan sounds familiar to you, that's probably because you've played SimCity before. According to Huffington Post, Sim City 4 default settings are set to 999: "the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes." But the best part of the story is the way SimCity's creators embrace the theft:

We encourage politicians to continue to look to innovative games like SimCity for inspiration for social and economic change," said Katsarelis. "While we at Maxis and Electronic Arts do not endorse any political candidates or their platforms, it's interesting to see GOP candidate Herman Cain propose a simplified tax system like one we designed for the video game SimCity 4."

Adopting such a simple tax structure, Katsarelis said, would allow fantasy political leaders to focus their energy on infrastructure and national security. "Our game design team thought that an easy to understand taxation system would allow players to focus on building their cities and have fun thwarting giant lizard attacks, rather than be buried by overly complex financial systems."

The way they handled this makes me feel really good about the fact that SimCity is one of my all-time favorite video games. (Via Wonkette.)