Are We Seeing The Last Gasp Of The GOP’s Two Santa Clause Scam?

[Godboy]

July 12 2022
The Mexican government has agreed to provide roughly $1.5 billion toward a host of new construction projects along the U.S.-Mexico border to strengthen the U.S.’s ability to screen and process migrants, a White House official said Tuesday.

The agreement was discussed Tuesday when Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met with President Joe Biden at the White House.

Sure beats what Trump got from Mexico.

August 31 2016
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto flatly contradicted Donald Trump’s statement that the two did not discuss who would pay for the GOP nominee’s proposed multibillion-dollar border wall, saying, “I made it clear Mexico will not pay.”

“Who pays for the wall? We didn’t discuss it,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question at a joint news conference after the closed-door meeting between the two in Mexico City.

What does you silly article have to do with reality? Until DeSantis flew these migrants to Martha's Vinyard, dems refused to acknowledge that we were in a state of emergency.

 

[Lesh]

Spending and tax cuts look exactly the same to the bottom line. It's high time to quit pretending otherwise.

More correctly

Tax cuts are debt producing...

 

[Lesh]

The good news is that during democrat admins the GOP is concerned about a Balanced Budget.

And ONLY then

Cynical bastards

 

[Smokin' OP]

What does you silly article have to do with reality? Until DeSantis flew these migrants to Martha's Vinyard, dems refused to acknowledge that we were in a state of emergency.

That's what the hysterical girls, Hannity and Carlson, repeat on FOX, every night.
Their cult washes, rinses and repeats.

 

[jbrownson0831]

And Republicans continue to adhere blindly to this failed, wrongheaded economic dogma.

5 Reasons Why Supply-Side Economics Does Not Work

Tax cuts, deregulation, and fiscal austerity aren’t necessarily a recipe for economic growth. Here’s why some economists disagree.

www.investopedia.com

I think your face looks like a dogma.

 

[kyzr]

Can you show how the GOP did not increase the debt?

Can you show where I said that?

I said BOTH parties deficit spend.

 

[kyzr]

Is that true right now? Do you see DeSantis winning in 2024 and then blowing a bunch of money? The only time republicans have ever spent a lot of money was for wars. Wars are always expensive.

Can anyone show me when republicans blew money on their own pet projects and wish list stuff like democrats? We aren't constructing monuments to the second Amendment. We aren't blowing billions on programs for "Christian values". We aren't spending millions on a "Ronald Reagan trail". We are sending money overseas to study the target shooting techniques of people in Pakistan.

1. When presidents win they want to spend money. Look at "helicopter Joe", $10,000 of student loan debt???

2. Tax cuts are "pet projects" they are gifts to their donors, and the rest of us pay the Debt.
"Only little people pay taxes"

 

[Godboy]

1. When presidents win they want to spend money. Look at "helicopter Joe", $10,000 of student loan debt???

2. Tax cuts are "pet projects" they are gifts to their donors, and the rest of us pay the Debt.
"Only little people pay taxes"

Only little people pay taxes because corporations will simply raise their prices when they are taxed more. The consumer ALWAYS pays for tax increases.

 

[Lesh]

Only little people pay taxes because corporations will simply raise their prices when they are taxed more. The consumer ALWAYS pays for tax increases.

That’s the mantra of the rich and corporations.

In reality they are already charging what the market will bear. If they don’t they are bad businesses

 

[whitehall]

It never fails does it? The Biden regime is on the brink of disaster and pitiful lefties dig up poor old Tricky Dick.

 

[Lesh]

It never fails does it? The Biden regime is on the brink of disaster and pitiful lefties dig up poor old Tricky Dick.

Just pointing out the origins of what the GOP now is

 

[whitehall]

The post belongs in the history forum. Lefties who weren't alive during the Nixon years criticize him because they are desperate to deflect attention from the current administration. Imagine ignoring LBJ's faked crisis that sent Troops to Vietnam and set the rules so that we could win every battle and still lose the freaking war while criticizing Nixon for trying to end it. If the media was doing it's job Bill Clinton would have been run out of office and Biden would have been laughed into retirement ten years ago.

 

[Papageorgio]

That's what the hysterical girls, Hannity and Carlson, repeat on FOX, every night.
Their cult washes, rinses and repeats.

You don't believe there is a border crisis?

 

[Independent thinker]

So let’s quickly review how Two Santas works.

Back in 1976 the Republican Party was a smoking ruin. Nixon had resigned after being busted for lying about his “secret plan to end the Vietnam War,” his involvement in the Watergate burglary, and his taking bribes from Jimmy Hoffa and the Milk Lobby. He only avoided prosecution because Gerald Ford pardoned him.

His first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had also resigned to avoid prosecution for taking bribes.

Newspaper and television editorialists were openly speculating the GOP might implode. The Party hadn’t held the House of Representatives for more than two consecutive years since 1930 (and wouldn’t until 1994), Jerry Ford had ended the War the year before in a national humiliation, the unemployment rate was over 7 percent, as was inflation after hovering around 11 percent the year before.

The Republican Party had little to offer the American people beyond anti-communism, their mainstay since the 1950s.

Americans knew it was Democrats who’d brought them Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, subsidized college, the right to unionize, antipoverty programs, and sent men to the moon. And they knew Republicans had opposed the “big government spending” associated with every single one of them.

But one man — a Republican strategist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal named Jude Wanniski — thought he saw a way out. It was, he argued, a strategy that could eventually bring about a permanent Republican governing majority.

In a WSJ op-ed that year, Wanniski pointed out that Americans thought of Democrats as the “Party of Santa” and Republicans as, essentially, Scrooge. Republicans, he noted, hadn’t even proposed a tax cut in 22 years!

The solution, Wanniski proposed, was for Republicans to start pushing tax cuts whenever the GOP held the White House. This would establish their Santa bona fides, particularly if Democrats objected. It would flip the script so Democrats would fill the role of Scrooge.

To make it even easier for Republicans to cut taxes, Wanniski invented and publicized a new economic theory called Supply-Side Economics. When taxes went down, he said, government revenue would magically go up!

Four years later, when Reagan came into the White House with the election of 1980, he picked up Wanniski’s strategy and doubled down on it. (In the primary of 1980, he’d even run on it: his primary opponent, George Herbert Walker Bush, derided it as “Voodoo Economics.”)

Reagan not only cut taxes on the rich: he also radically increased government spending, goosing the economy into a sugar high while throwing the nation deeply into debt.

Citing Supply-Side Economics, in eight short years Reagan ran up greater deficits than every president from George Washington to Jerry Ford combined, taking our national debt from around $800 billion all the way up to around $2.6 trillion when he left office.

By 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, Reagan and Bush’s debt had climbed to over $4.2 trillion, giving Republicans a chance to double down on Two Santas. Bill Clinton would be their test case.

House Republicans loudly demanded that Clinton “do something!” about the national debt, waving the debt ceiling like a cudgel. Over the next eight years they repeatedly wielded the debt ceiling, shutting down the government twice. The battles lifted Newt Gingrich to the speakership.

Clinton caved, making massive cuts to the social safety net to get a balanced budgetin a gut-shot to the Democratic Santa programs.

By the end of the Clinton presidency the formula was set. When Republicans held the White House, they’d spend like drunken Santas and cut taxes to the bone to drive up the national debt.

When Democrats come into the presidency, Republicans would use the debt ceiling to force them to cut their own social programs and shoot the Democratic Santa.

As I noted last November, when Clinton shot Santa Claus the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Claus strategy, they used the debt ceiling as a weapon.

State after state turned red and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memothat said, in part:

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/20/2148273/-Are-We-Seeing-the-Last-Gasp-of-the-GOP-s-Two-Santa-Claus-Scam

Raising taxes on corporations he poor to help the rich get richer isn’t that popular?

Who would have thought?

Democrats have signed off on every dollar spent.

 

[kyzr]

Only little people pay taxes because corporations will simply raise their prices when they are taxed more. The consumer ALWAYS pays for tax increases.

That's NOT what "The Queen of Mean" meant, is it? The wealthy ALWAYS get tax loopholes that we don't get.

Leona Helmsley - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes"

 

[Seymour Flops]

HOw the hell was Trump supposed to stop dems in Congress from blowing money?

By not signing off on spending bills. But then we'd have had to listen to Dems cry and angrily lisp about the "shut down."

 

[Dragonlady]

Just send a check for a few thousand dollars to those in the 45 to 60 thousand dollars range negotiating it up or downward if annual income is less or more. I am sorry. You are thieves. Supporting your ways of promoting living and charging others for it.

This is the system the Republican tax system sets up. The middle class is now subsidizing low wages for America's most profitable corporations, while the corporations and their billionaire owners are paying nothing.

Like the Republican immigration enforcement system - lock up illegals at YOUR expense, but don't prosecute their millionaire employers who don't pay taxes, and encouraged them to come.

And still you promote Republicans and their policies.

 

[Dragonlady]

By not signing off on spending bills. But then we'd have had to listen to Dems cry and angrily lisp about the "shut down."

Fiscal ignorance is deep with this one.

It's not the Dem's who are worried about a shut down. It's Wall Street, and Main Street, and government workers who will be without income. The last time Republicans tried this irresponsible stunt, the nation's credit was downgraded for the first time in history, and it cost the nation trillions of dollars.

 

[Seymour Flops]

Fiscal ignorance is deep with this one.

It's not the Dem's who are worried about a shut down. It's Wall Street, and Main Street, and government workers who will be without income. The last time Republicans tried this irresponsible stunt, the nation's credit was downgraded for the first time in history, and it cost the nation trillions of dollars.

Government "workers" get a free vacation disguised as a furlough. For each "shutdown" they've always been paid "backpay" for "missed work." Each fight over the budget or debt has saved trillions in the long run by giving the GOP at least some leverage to control Democratic spending sprees.

 

[Papageorgio]

This is the system the Republican tax system sets up. The middle class is now subsidizing low wages for America's most profitable corporations, while the corporations and their billionaire owners are paying nothing.

Like the Republican immigration enforcement system - lock up illegals at YOUR expense, but don't prosecute their millionaire employers who don't pay taxes, and encouraged them to come.

And still you promote Republicans and their policies.

If what you say is true, then why does the tax foundation indicate differently?

Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data, 2023 Update

The latest IRS data shows that the U.S. federal individual income tax continued to be progressive, borne primarily by the highest income earners.

taxfoundation.org

Why did a record number of corporations not pay any taxes in 2021 and what did the Democratic held House, Senate and Executive to stop this? They had the legislative and executive branch and did nothing.

Report: 19 Fortune 100 Companies Paid Little or No Taxes for 2021

www.nysscpa.org

To me it is simple, the Republicans and Democrats write laws for the rich and then send scraps to the lower income groups. Hence, that is why I despise the two parties.

In Canada the top 20% pay under 56% of Canada‘s taxes. In the US the top 10% pay over 70% of all income taxes. So fix Canada’s unfair taxes by your party before you complain about ours.

Measuring the Distribution of Taxes in Canada: Do the Rich Pay Their “Fair Share”?

www.fraserinstitute.org