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

[Billiejeens]

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?

Dailykoz
Ya'll are literally insane.

 

[Billiejeens]

Tax cuts are spending.

Damn you stupid

 

[Billiejeens]

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

Nope

 

[kyzr]

Nope

spending is spending
tax cuts reduce revenue and increase borrowing and interest payments

 

[g5000]

Democrats: Tax and spend

Republicans: Borrow and spend

 

[kyzr]

Democrats: Tax and spend
Republicans: Borrow and spend

Generally true lately, BUT, Newt was the last Speaker to balance a budget. Maybe McCarthy can work the same magic?

 

[Billiejeens]

spending is spending
tax cuts reduce revenue and increase borrowing and interest payments

They dont.

 

[g5000]

Generally true lately, BUT, Newt was the last Speaker to balance a budget. Maybe McCarthy can work the same magic?

McCarthy can't find his ass with both hands.

 

[Lesh]

McCarthy can't find his ass with both hands.

And a map

 

[Papageorgio]

America Lost $10.2 Trillion In 2008

www.businessinsider.com

We are talking about the last government shut down, not the recession in 2008. Sorry you got confused.

 

[Papageorgio]

And a map

Pelosi wasn’t any better, she want to spend over $6 trillion and send inflation even higher. She presided over a House that sent debt to new heights. I wish for another Clinton, Gingrich partnership, they made it work. No one wants to give in anymore.

 

[j-mac]

I'm not sure of the details, but the way it was explained to me is that they don't get help from us, they will get it from those that would harm us. I wouldn't argue with you if you called it buying friendship, but it seems to mostly work.

Our southern border doesn’t look like it’s working to me….And, we all learned at a very young age, can’t buy your friends.

 

[j-mac]

Yes he did. And nobody is trying to argue that him nor the Dems do not spend a shit ton of money.

But you on the right always pretend your beloved party does not do that, yet the facts show otherwise. You all try to give your god a free pass for all the spending he did.

Trump isn’t the POTUS right now, and two wrongs don’t make a right…

But, I note your defense of dems here.

 

[j-mac]

I agreed with you on Biden. Do try and keep up.

In the same post, you then deflected by trying to turn the conversation to Trump….So, that tells me you’re defending dems here.

 

[j-mac]

How the hell did the Dems on Congress make Trump ask for the most amount of spending in the history of the country?

You really don’t understand politics?

 

[j-mac]

More correctly

Tax cuts are debt producing...

Wasteful Spending List | Congressman Bill Posey :: Representing the 8th District of Florida

posey.house.gov

 

[j-mac]

You're FOS.
Trump never had the border closed.
Biden never opened it.

January 6 2023
The Biden administration unveiled a blanket policy to immediately eject asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico without having previously applied for asylum in a third country — which means obtaining a financial sponsor in the U.S. and going through a background check.

The same “transit ban” policy is already in place for migrants from Venezuela, an extension of the Title 42 measure deployed by the Trump administration in the first year of the pandemic as a way to turn away migrants under the guise of public health. In some nine months under Trump, nearly half a million people were removed under the law; keeping the law around for two years, the Biden administration has already used it to deport over 2 million.

Biden’s border regime would be no more acceptable if it were a political ploy aimed at insulating Democrats from “law and order” attacks by the right, but it isn’t even that: Republicans have made clear that they will paint Biden as an “open border” president, regardless of how harshly Trumpian his border policies remain.

AND that's exactly what FOX and teabaggers are doing.

Ahead of El Paso visit, Biden says U.S. will allow 30,000 migrants from four countries to enter monthly

Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be allowed entry and given work permits. The administration will also expand the use of Title 42 to expel more migrants to Mexico.

www.texastribune.org

 

[Smokin' OP]

Ahead of El Paso visit, Biden says U.S. will allow 30,000 migrants from four countries to enter monthly

Migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela will be allowed entry and given work permits. The administration will also expand the use of Title 42 to expel more migrants to Mexico.

www.texastribune.org

"In order to qualify, the migrants must apply from their home countries, pass a background check and prove they have a financial supporter in the U.S."

 

[j-mac]

"In order to qualify, the migrants must apply from their home countries, pass a background check and prove they have a financial supporter in the U.S."

Yeah, sure they do…

 

[toobfreak]

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.

SKEWED AGAIN. Nixon was actually America's most popular president ever and he was set up by the CIA because Nixon planned on going after the unelected deep state.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999

That wreckage was imperialist Marxism, America for sale to the highest bidder by the democrats. And we know who was the highest bidder.

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

The idiot moron can't even type a coherent sentence, and he wants to pretend that he is giving us the inside skinny???