2 two santas

see supply side

see deficit see voodoo tax cuts

see austerity

see debt hostage (ceiling)

see thom

---

NO LNX

How the GOP has conned America for 40 years

:{Thom Hartmann December 29, 2025 | 0

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.

Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 28 percent, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:

They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;

They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100 percent of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);

They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;

And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ’80s and ’90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in the Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91 percent top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70 percent of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in the Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and 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 Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

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 memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his eight years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218 percent increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86 percent to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for two years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

---

AN 7 25

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is facing backlash after accusing Democrats of "blowing out the deficit in 2020" — a year when Donald Trump was president.

In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday morning, Bessent blamed the Democratic Party for the 2020 deficit crisis, despite the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House at the time.

His comments quickly sparked criticism and mockery on social media, with many pointing out the contradiction.

Singer-songwriter Ricky Davila wrote: "MAGA fraudster Scott Bessent falsely accused the Democratic Party of blowing out the deficit in 2020. Problem with that bulls--- accusation is that the orange felon was in office in 2020, not President Biden. They literally lie about everything."

IFrame Content

Democratic activist Lucas Sanders wrote: "Scott Bessent: 'The Democratic Party blew out the deficit in 2020.' WHAT? Can someone tell him who was the president in 2020?"

"Does the Treasury Secretary know who controlled the White House and Senate in 2020?" wrote a user.

"MAGA always drop to the Ad Hominem attack when they're unable to defend their horrible policies," said a user on X.

"Who wants to remind him who the president was in 2020? Also, Trump is now blowing up the deficit even more than Biden ever did," wrote another.

"They love trying to rewrite history. Biden became president in Jan 2021. All the stuff they complain happened with Covid started in 2020, and they always blame that on Biden too," said another X user.

Many also criticized the host for not fact-checking Bessent.

"This is WHY Americans are so ill informed. She didn't correct him! She just ignored that and moved on. When the media talking heads don't correct the record the zombies just beleive what they hear!" remarked a user.

---

no lnx

Republicans and the biggest political con of the last century

Thom Hartmann May 24, 2025

Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:

“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”

Donald Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:

“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump as also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“

But why? What the hell is going on here?

Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. They point out that if unemployment numbers included the underemployed and those stuck in “poverty-wage jobs,” it would be around 24%, not the 4.2% recently reported, leading to an acknowledgement of a widespread misery that’s largely hidden by the way we currently calculate unemployment.

Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.

Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.

The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.

And nobody’s sure why.

The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.

At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.

You could call it treason, except that it’s become so normalized and institutionalized that most Americans wouldn’t even understand the reason for the label.

Republican policy weirdness that brought us to this moment began around the national debt in 1981.

The U.S. was significantly in debt following our Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Following the philosophy that a large national debt should only exist during a time of national emergency, in each case, after the end of each war, we began a serious effort to pay down that debt.

Andrew Jackson finished paying off the entire debt from the Revolutionary War in the 1830s. We’d largely paid off the debt from the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, and, as the Treasury Department notes on its debt history site, our “government ended the century with its finances in very good order.”

We paid the national debt for WWI down to a mere $17 billion by the time the Republican Great Depression hit, but between the cost of the New Deal and World War II, we entered the post-WWII era in 1946 with a debt equal to 106% of GDP, a ratio we hit again in 2015.

Republicans and Democrats quickly united around the idea of paying off our national debt in the post-war years, driving it down to a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) between 1945 and 1981 when Reagan came into office.

And then, following Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santas” plan, the GOP embarked on an experiment that had never been intentionally tried in the U.S. or any other developed country in world history: drive up the national debt as high as possible with massive tax breaks for the very richest among us.

Reagan did this for two reasons:

— First, deficit spending with trillions in borrowed money (he ran the debt up to $2.4 trillion in a mere 8 years) stimulates the economy, so people thought Reagan had produced good times. (Give me a $2 trillion credit card, and I’ll show you what it looks like to live large, too!)

— Second, the rising debt gave Republicans the perfect excuse to follow Wanniski’s advice to force the Democrats to “shoot their Santa [of programs like Social Security and Medicaid] in the face.” Whenever a Republican is in the White House, Wanniski argued, Republicans should run up the debt as hard and fast as possible, so when a Democrat is in the White House they can squeal about “the debt our children will inherit! Oh, the humanity!”

The GOP has stuck to this strategy for 44 years now, running up $36 trillion in debt (and our entire Gross Domestic Product was a mere $27.7 trillion last year) and now, finally, we’ve reached the point where this unsustainable debt is not only costing us a trillion dollars a year in debt service (interest payments) but has led to a downgrade of our nation’s credit score.

At first, the main effect of the Two Santas strategy was merely to make the morbidly rich among us fabulously richer, while extracting much of that wealth from the homes, retirement plans, and savings of the middle class. It was, quite simply, a planned and successful transfer of roughly $50 trillion into the money bins of the rich, almost all of it coming out of the hides and lives of the rest of us.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class with a single paycheck being able to buy a home, a car, raise a family, put the kids through school, and provide for a decent retirement.

Today, that same standard of living requires a bit more than two full-time jobs, and only about 47% of us are in the middle class (with two wage earners instead of just one in 1981).

“‘The middle class has been declining — we just haven't recognized it fully,’ LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig told CBS MoneyWatch. ‘It’s really dangerous because it’s the kind of thing that leads to social unrest, and it’s not fair. The American dream is not that it’s given to you — it’s that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead and achieve the things in life that you want to achieve. It’s not living in a tent, not having to steal.”

But now Trump, Musk, Vance, and congressional Republicans — having first crushed the American middle class — are doing everything they can to destroy America’s preeminent position in the world along with our social safety net.

— Instead of investing in education and science, they’re making it harder for students to get an education.

— Instead of promoting democracy around the world, they’re embracing murderous dictators while broadcasting rightwing neofascist propaganda on Voice of America.

— Instead of lifting up Americans by helping our veterans and providing food, healthcare, and shelter to the poor and disabled, they’re gutting the VA and the social safety net.

As a result, today nearly half of American children (45% or 34 million kids) rely on food and medical programs that are now targeted by “Christian” Mike Johnson’s House Republicans in their Big Brutal Bill providing trillions in tax breaks to billionaires. The proposed cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, for example, would be the largest in the history of the U.S.

Reagan’s Two Santas strategy has done serious harm to America, collapsing the economic futures of two entire generations.

And now they’re going after our government itself.

But, why? Nobody’s sure.

— Did Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or both tell Trump and/or Elon Musk to destroy America?

— Are our country’s billionaires so psychopathically greedy that they’re willing to sell us all out for another few billion dollars in tax breaks?

— Do Trump’s allies believe that if they can impoverish Americans we’ll be more willing to go along with their authoritarian agenda the way Germans did after being immiserated by the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s?

— Are they following the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophers of Silicon Valley who argue that democracy is outdated and “we need to get over our dictator phobia” and let the tech giants run the country?

Nobody knows for sure. Nobody can really explain it.

Republicans are aren’t even pretending anymore; they’re not even bothering to proclaim BS like “trickle down” or the “need to support the job creators.“

Most distressing, there’s virtually no discussion of any of this in the mainstream press.

— The Two Santas strategy is easily documented, but never mentioned.

— The explosion of our national debt is all over economists’ websites, but when the American media mentions it, it’s always in the context of Democrats needing to “reduce spending” rather than the fact that virtually 100% of our debt today was put there exclusively by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal wars.

— Nobody, it seems, is speculating about why Trump and Musk would want to kill off USAID or kneecap the FAA and the National Weather Service. Qui bono (who benefits?) other than Putin and Xi? The savings are a drop in the billionaire’s bucket; there must be a larger agenda than just funding tax cuts for billionaires.

— And, they’re now holding their votes in the middle of the night; I think we all know what they are hiding and the credulous press is letting pass.

I don’t know why Republicans have been so enthusiastic about first destroying the American middle class and now our government itself, but the consequences have driven the explosion of rightwing anger, racism, and misogyny that’s been sweeping the nation since Trump’s appearance on the scene in 2015.

And now they’re threatening our position in the world, as well as possibly leading us all into a third world war.

Why do you think this is happening?

NOW READ: 'Trump's tactics are in fact communist': Former Tea Party congressman busts MAGA for what it is

---

maga mike cut safety net to give more tax breaks to billionaires rec number in cabinet musk 1st buddy doge have to live in our means, tough for a while then endless prosperity

an 12 24

Trump and his GOP allies are determined to extend the corporate tax cuts that were enacted in2017 during his first term.

Many Republicans have been downplaying the effect that doing so would have on the United States' federal deficit.

But according to Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell, they are ignoring the math involved.

Rampell, in her December 10 column, argues, "The GOP's first order of business: getting rid of math. The fractious Republican Party can agree on few things these days. But one of them is near-unanimous frustration with the pesky laws of arithmetic. That cutting future taxes would reduce future tax revenue, for instance, perpetually aggrieves them."

Republicans who favor extending the corporate tax cuts, according to Rampell, are ignoring how much it will increase the federal deficit.

"A large chunk of the 2017 Trump tax cuts expires next year, and extending these provisions will be extremely expensive," Rampell explains. "That's why Republicans scheduled them to sunset in the first place: to lower the price tag. The Congressional Budget Office, the legislature’s official scorekeeper, estimates a full extension would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade."

The Post columnist adds, "That's true even after considering any potential growth effects on the U.S. economy. It might also understate the full cost of GOP tax plans, since it doesn't include Trump's other pricey promises: slashing corporate taxes, eliminating taxes on Social Security, overtime and tips. Those would add trillions more in red ink — awkward for a party that fancies itself fiscally responsible."

*Catherine Rampell's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required)

---

an 12 24

no lnx

alternet

Here comes the GOP's Santa scam again

The GOP-caused fiscal disaster and government shutdown has been postponed until March, but in the meantime, House Republicans have laid out their vision for the future of America.

In a budget document they released last year, anticipating this very moment, the legislators proposed dramatic $9 trillion cuts to Social Security, food stamps, aid to women and children, Medicare and Medicaid, along a new round of tax cuts for America’s billionaires. Their argument is that we need to “balance the budget now!”

This is the classic Two Santas strategy that the GOP has been running ever since 1981. In addition to showing the hypocrisy and depravity of these politicians who are happy to live on the largesse of rightwing billionaires but see no benefit in feeding hungry children, it also shows that Jude Wanniski’s grand plan, adopted by Reagan in 1981, is alive and well.

It’s no accident or coincidence that the threat of a failure to pay the nation’s bills or fund an upcoming year constantly happens when Republicans control the House of Representatives.

You could even call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory — with a unique name — here. And it all started with a guy named Jude Wanniski, who literally transformed Republican Party politics with a plan that the American mainstream media, astonishingly, continues to ignore.

Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

To set up its foundation, Wanniski’s “Two Santas” strategy dictates, when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency and tripled down on it during the presidencies of Bush and Trump with massive tax cuts for billionaires and increases in spending across-the-board.

Those massive tax cuts and that uncontrolled spending during four Republican presidencies produced three results:

They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;

They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $36 trillion today, all of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal off-the-books wars);

And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “you must cut spending to solve the crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes, the “Two Santas” strategy goes. Tie up legislation, deny a quorum, filibuster, shut down the government, whatever.

Which is why, following Wanniski’s script, Republicans were squealing about the national debt and saying they will refuse to fund the government, possibly crashing the US economy on Biden’s watch.

And, once again, the media covered it as a “Debt Crisis!” rather than what it really is: a cynical political and media strategy devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the 1980s, and since then rolled out every time a Democrat is in the White House.

Politically, it’s a brilliant strategy that was hatched by a fellow most people have never heard of: Jude Wanniski.

Republican strategist Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in The Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP, particularly when Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because ever since the 1930s they’d publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic New Deal — as well as their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, schools, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” — and Democrats’ 91% top tax rates on the morbidly rich didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the morbidly rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too.

But because Republicans hated the idea of helping working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head. (Everybody then understood that demand — “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earn in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services.)

To lay the ground for Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and claimed the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things (“demand”) but, instead, because business made things (“supply”) available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he said, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 move by the Reagan Republicans to cut taxes while increasing spending seems irrational, cynical, and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, Arthur Laffer took that equation a step further with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time and our $36 trillion national debt have proven both to be colossal idiocies — but if Americans would buy into it all, they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy.

He told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (then a newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in The Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Ronald Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski’s supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing nothing to benefit average Americans.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party.

Democrats, Wanniski told the GOP, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors, oil companies, and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s theory went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions because that money would “trickle down” to workers from the billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new mansions.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people’s taxes!

For working people, the tax cuts would only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, part of which they knew would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Every time a Democrat was in the White House, they’d be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes; or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either one would lose them elections, and if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he was elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

Republicans embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in twelve years than every president in history up until that time — from George Washington to Jimmy Carter — combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

Clinton buckled under the threat of a government shutdown: he raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

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 Clauses strategy with brutal threats to shut down the government, they finally took it over in the middle of Clinton’s presidency.

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 Congress to the White House.

Newt had done his job in the House of Representatives. Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”

Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when they were in office; but they knew well how to scream hysterically about it and hook in the economically naïve media as soon as Democrats again took power.

Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work. Using the “fiscal responsibility” argument — essentially Two Santas in drag — Republicans have forced two Democratic presidents, and tried to try to force a third, to gut-shoot the Democratic Santa established by FDR.

Using this strategy, Republicans held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor’s representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 8 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Ronald Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.6 trillion in his 8 years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history until Trump.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218% increase in our debt; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five rightwingers on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he immediately reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding several trillion in borrowed money to pay for his two tax cuts for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $8 trillion.

There was not a whisper about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney — who knew Wanniski personally — famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:

“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86% to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t be put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

So much so that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him. And then we got the “sequester” out of it: a freeze on Democratic spending and political power along with automatic cuts to social programs if certain terms weren’t adhered to. It was a successful hostage-taking exercise that is still largely in place.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by over $8 trillion, and the GOP funded the government without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended the debt ceiling altogether for 2020 (so, if Biden won, he’d have to justify raising the debt ceiling for 2 years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And last Friday, Republicans again tried using the renewal of government funding for fiscal year 2025 to drop their Two Santas bomb right onto President Joe Biden’s head. After all, it worked against Clinton and Obama and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

And if the GOP’s failure to fund the government crashes the economy, all the better. Republicans can just blame Biden: it’ll give Trump a great bragging point and make it easier for him and Congress to pass a new tax cut for billionaires!

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated, and by whom. Sadly, although I and others (it’s even detailed on Wikipedia!) have been calling out Wanniski’s scheme for decades, none of the national media have ever seriously examined this 40+ year GOP strategy.

Hopefully when they write obituaries for Trump’s effort last week to raise the debt ceiling, and revisit this scam in March, Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam and let Americans know how they’ve been conned for over 40 years.

===

FACT: Democrats restore economies that Republicans wreck - Alternet.org

ALTERNET+ no lnx

FACT: Democrats restore economies that Republicans wreck

Donald J. Trump shakes hands with the 44th President of the United States, Barack H. Obama during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. (DoD photo by U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo)

D. Earl StephensMay 07, 2024

There’s plenty of good news out there, people, even if during this endless money grab called “election season,” our click-bait corporate media would rather you didn’t see any of it.

The United States economy is once again the envy of the entire free world, much of which is still gasping for air, struggling along in the turbulent wake of a once-in-a-century killer pandemic the morbid, “pro-life” Republican Party would prefer we all just forgot about.

The U.S. dollar is strong, wages are up, inflation is down, and our jobless rate is historically low. Sure, we have a way to go to get back to the economy we enjoyed during Barack Obama’s Administration, before the ghastly Donald Trump became just the latest Republican to wreck it by handing over our hard-earned money to billionaires, and making it easier for them to line his slippery, 10-gallon pockets, while stepping on the necks of powerless consumers of all political stripes.

To be crystal clear: Damn near any good that happened with our economy during Trump’s disastrous administration was inherited from Obama. He simply went on to wreck it, which he has done his whole miserable life with literally everything he bangs into. Check out the numbers when this nuclear-powered blowhard took over in 2017, and when he left whining like 300-lb. baby in 2021.

And if you come back at me that the pandemic contributed to the orange gasbag’s massacre of our economy, then you better explain to me why he ignored it, and then lied about it for months and months, before finally suggesting — his pudgy, little hands flailing about — that we try chugging Lysol to save ourselves.

READ: Dictators — even those who start out as a 'Dictator for a Day” — play for keeps

He had no damn idea what he was doing while hundreds of thousand of Americans were dying. You’ll never get a more terrifying example of complete incompetence, seasoned with his trademark lack of empathy for human suffering than that disgusting state of affairs.

As his very own Secretary of State confirmed, the man is “a moron” and his four years in office was an ever-expanding disaster area of government shutdowns, Nazi-coddling, impeachments, childish threats to build a damn wall, a documented 30,573 lies, an attempted coup, and a busted economy that was leaking jobs faster than Rudy Giuliani’s fat head sweats out black hair dye.

And have we already forgotten how hard he tried to kill Obamacare, with absolutely nothing lined up to replace it? Imagine how bad things would have been during the pandemic if he had somehow rammed that one through his Republican Senate?

Thinking of you, John McCain ...

And you’ll remember, it was Obama who took over from George Bush the Far Stupider One. He left us with a war in Iraq he lied about, the Great Recession, and the worst economy in 75 years.

It was yet another terrible time under a Republican president.

Of course, Bush the Far Stupider One inherited a great economy from Democrat Bill Clinton, before wrecking it, and giving way to Obama, who spent the next eight, blissful, uneventful years restoring America, and making her whole again.

Obama was so successful in returning calm and normalcy to our country, self-satisfied Democrats fell asleep at the wheel while Tea Party Republicans led by Mitch McConnell took a baseball bat to our judiciary and beat the living truth out of it.

All this Republican malfeasance only serves to highlight the long, distinguished pattern of Democrats repairing economies the GOP has wrecked the past 100 years. This is an ironclad piece of historical fact that has been woefully underreported through the years, and certainly during this election cycle, where President Joe Biden is delivering good economic news and policies that benefit all of us seemingly every day, with but a whisper of a mention from the press.

How else to explain why a majority of Americans still somehow think that the party that has provably ruined economies over the decades is better with our money than the party which fixes them?

The truth is, economic rebirth is happening yet again under a Democratic Administration, and if nothing else, is a great talking point if you are still in the risky habit of arguing politics with members of our country’s insurrection party, who hate facts almost as much as they have grown to hate what America is supposed to stand for — namely, truth and justice.

Democrats have been bailing out these obnoxious loudmouths for going on a century, and it’s about time they at least had the decency to say, thank you.

In addition to being just the latest Democratic president to repair our economy, and once again make it a beacon for the rest of the world, consider Joe Biden signed yet more legislation last week that will protect our public lands from the monstrous corporate Republicans who would rather destroy it.

Is there anything more important than protecting these pristine environments and all the beautiful, necessary things that inhabit them from the callous, rightwing outlaws who have proven just how much they mean to harm them?

And if time and again it’s the Democrats who are standing up for the environment and the beautiful animals who own it, what of those Republicans who shoot their pets and then make a point of bragging about it for political gain?

Surely you’ve heard about South Dakota Governor Kristin Noem, a vice presidential frontrunner on Trump’s fascist, get-out-of-jail-free ticket. Noem wrote a memoir titled: No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.

Well, we learned last weekend thanks to some great reporting by The Guardian that the pie-eyed Noem is what’s wrong with politics, because she thinks America’s way forward starts with murdering our pets.

Noem went into great and gory detail in her book about proudly shooting her puppy, Cricket, who “she hated” for having the audacity to act like a puppy, before finishing off a pet goat during her killing spree just for good measure.

This is astonishing cruelty, even from a member of a party that does nothing except pray for our dead children after they have been slaughtered in our schools by other subhumans who “hate” living things. It’s just more bile from the party that talks a good game about respecting life, even if by action they continually show us how little tolerance they have for it.

And let me duck in here real quick, to remind everybody that it is Biden and the Democrats who have proven themselves serious about trying to end the insane carnage from all these damn guns that the “pro life” Republicans are paid well by the heinous gun lobby to avoid at all costs.

So why did Noem choose to include this in her book? What sane person shoots their pets and then publicly brags about it? Well, according to the puppy-killer herself, she just wanted everybody in America to know that as an aspirant to the White House, she can make tough decisions.

I ask you: Is there anything more Republican than that?

This is the world we are living in right now. While Biden is restoring our economy, protecting our nation’s lands, standing up for our rights, and rebuilding our infrastructure, his opponent is in court for campaign fraud for illegally funneling money to hide the truth about screwing a Playboy bunny while his third wife was pregnant, and then screwing another adult movie actress right after his wife had delivered their child.

Biden quietly goes to church on Sundays to pray for a nation he is working tirelessly to protect, while Trump attacks America, avoids church, and is beloved by millions who practice a sick and evil strain of Christianity that has taken Christ and anything good and wholesome out of their religion.

Now guess which candidate is getting the most press?

Thanks to Democrats, there are plenty of great things happening out there to make America and Americans’ lives better and safer, because that’s what they have been doing for the past 100 years.

Everybody would profit mightily if we finally heard a helluva lot more about that.

NOW READ: The stunning reason Donald Trump thinks he’s going to win

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Watch: Fox News Host Laughs in GOP Rep's Face for Claiming Republicans Don’t Exacerbate Partisanship ›

The public isn’t 'skeptical' of Biden’s strong economic performance — just Republicans ›

The silent revolution in American economics ›

Americans pay a high price for the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibility ›

Economist Paul Krugman: 'Poor public perceptions' of US economy are 'entirely about MAGA' ›

===

an 12 24

Republicans are already revealing their eagerness to cut earned benefits for millions of Americans, if one House Republican is to be believed.

In a recent interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) said that he aims to convince his fellow lawmakers that "hard decisions" need to be made about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if his party is to succeed in its goal of making sweeping budget cuts.

"75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary," McCormick said, referencing the three programs that provide income and health insurance to retirees, low-income Americans and the disabled. "There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it. We just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on."

New Republic writer Hafiz Rashid highlighted McCormick's interview to make the point that Republicans are "chomping at the bit at some of their favorite targets" in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's victory. And he noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also mentioned the possibility of making cuts to those three programs in order to fatten the Pentagon budget, along with "the infamous conservative manifesto Project 2025."

"While McCormick pledges to talk to the Democrats about such cuts, the GOP is unlikely to get much traction with the opposing party, especially since Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House where a single vote or two could tank their legislative agenda.," Rashid wrote. "Even if the GOP manages to win over a couple of Democrats, any plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid will get pushback from powerful organizations such as the AARP. Older voters who rely on the programs also make up the base of the Republican Party, and politicians from both parties should be wary of provoking them."

Notably, McCormick didn't mention one of his party's more costly goals: Extending Trump's 2017 tax cut package that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich. Politico estimated that an extension would require roughly $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which even some Republicans were worried about.

Watch the video of McCormick's comments below, or by**clicking this link.**

READ MORE:['Biggest challenge': Even Republicans are nervous about Trump's new $4.6 trillion tax cut

===

10 23 an comm dr

$10 trillion in added debt shows 'Bush and Trump tax cuts broke our modern tax structure' - Alternet.org

U.S. Treasury Department on Friday released new figures related to the 2023 budget that showed a troubling drop in the nation's tax revenue compared to GDP—a measure which fell to 16.5% despite a growing economy—and an annual deficit increase that essentially doubled from the previous year.

"After record U.S. government spending in 2020 and 2021" due to programs related to the economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis, the Washington Postreports, "the deficit dropped from close to $3 trillion to close to $1 trillion in 2022. But rather than continue to fall to its pre-pandemic levels, the deficit unexpectedly jumped this year to roughly $2 trillion."

While much of the reporting on the Treasury figures painted a picture of various and overlapping dynamics to explain the surge in the deficit—including higher payments on debt due to interest rates, tax filing waivers related to extreme weather events, the impact of a student loan forgiveness program that was later rescinded, or a dip in capital gains receipts—progressive tax experts say none of those complexities should act to shield what's at the heart of a budget that brings in less than it spends: tax giveaways to the rich.

Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, has argued repeatedly that growing deficits in recent years have a clear and singular chief cause: Republican tax cuts that benefit mostly the wealthy and profitable corporations.

In response to the Treasury figures released Friday, Kogan said that "roughly 75%" of the surge in the deficit and the debt ratio, the amount of federal debt relative to the overall size of the economy, was due to revenue decreases resulting from GOP-approved tax cuts over recent decades. "Of the remaining 25%," he said, "more than half" was higher interest payments on the debt related to Federal Reserve policy.

"We have a revenue problem, due to tax cuts," said Kogan, pointing to the major tax laws enacted under the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. "The Bush and Trump tax cuts broke our modern tax structure. Revenue is significantly lower and no longer grows much with the economy." And he offered this visualization about a growing debt ratio:

"The point I want to make again and again and again is that, relative to the last time CBO was projecting stable debt/GDP, spending is down, not up," Kogan said in a tweet Friday night. "It's lower revenue that's 100% responsible for the change in debt projections. If you take away nothing else, leave with this point."

In his tweet, Kogan offered the following chart to show recent and projected levels of both federal revenue and spending relative to gross domestic product (GDP):

In a detailed analysis produced in March, Kogan explained that, "If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions—as well as the Trump tax cuts—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded."

On Friday, the office of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) cited those same numbers in a press release responding to the Treasury's new report.

"Tax giveaways for the wealthy are continuing to starve the federal government of needed revenue: those passed by former Presidents Trump and Bush have added $10 trillion to the debt and account for 57 percent of the increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio since 2001," read the statement. "If not for those tax cuts, U.S. debt would be declining as a share of the economy."

Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, said the dip in federal revenue and growth in the overall deficit both have the same primary cause: GOP fealty to the wealthy individuals and powerful corporations that bankroll their campaigns.

"In their blind loyalty to their mega-donors, Republicans' fixation on giant tax cuts for billionaires has created a revenue problem that is driving up our national debt," Whitehouse said Friday night. "Even as federal spending fell over the last year relative to the size of the economy, the deficit increased because Republicans have rigged the tax code so that big corporations and the wealthy can avoid paying their fair share."

Offering a solution, Whitehouse said, "Fixing our corrupted tax code and cracking down on wealthy tax cheats would help bring down the deficit. It would also ensure teachers and firefighters don't pay higher tax rates than billionaires, level the playing field for small businesses, and promote a stronger economy for all."

None of the latest figures—those showing that tax cuts have injured revenues and therefore spiked deficits and increased debt—should be a surprise.

In 2018, shortly after the Trump tax cuts were signed into law, a Congressional Budget Office (CBo) report predicted precisely this result: that revenues would plummet; annual deficits would grow; and not even the promise of economic growth made by Republicans to justify the giveaway would be enough to make up the difference in the budget.

"The CBO's latest report exposes the scam behind the rosy rhetoric from Republicans that their tax bill would pay for itself," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and now Senate Majority Leader, said at the time.

"Republicans racked up the national debt by giving tax breaks to their billionaire buddies, and now they want everyone else to pay for them."

In its 2018 report, the CBO predicted the deficit would rise to $804 billion by the end of that fiscal year. Now, for all the empty promises and howling from the GOP and their allied deficit hawks, the economic prescription they forced through Congress has resulted in an annual deficit of more than double that, all while demanding the nation's poorest and most vulnerable pay the price by demanding key social programs—including food aid, education budgets, unemployment benefits, and housing assistance—be slashed.

Meanwhile, the GOP majority in the U.S. House—with or without a Speaker currently holding the gavel—still has plans to extend the Trump tax cuts if given half a chance. In May, a CBO analysis of that pending legislation found that such an extension would add an additional $3.5 trillion to the national debt.

"Republicans racked up the national debt by giving tax breaks to their billionaire buddies, and now they want everyone else to pay for them," Sen. Whitehouse said at the time. "It is one of life's great enigmas that Republicans can keep a straight face while they simultaneously cite the deficit to extort massive spending cuts to critical programs and support a bill that would blow up deficits to extend trillions in tax cuts for the people who need them the least."

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Heather Digby Parton / SalonDecember 24, 2018

So long, Republican Congress, and good riddance.

no lnx

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 24, 2018

Poor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols — a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy "summits" that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama's opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his "Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan's performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn't control his crazies on the one hand and couldn't deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn't even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan's retirement. Commenting on the media's surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don't think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let's recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn't negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan's just rolled along with all of Trump's lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It's important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That's one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn't.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father's incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn't get Obamacare repealed, although Trump's minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn't get Trump's wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That's quite a record.

But don't worry. This will work out just fine for them. It's just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to "grow up" and "take their medicine" by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It's a beautiful scam and it's been working for decades. If you didn't know better you'd almost think they planned it this way.

AN cody f

When the Tea Party movement arose in response to President Barack Obama’s presidency, it represented a loose coalition of activists, conservative leaders, and Republicans who voiced furious opposition to the federal government and the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. But as the movement coalesced into a group with actual power, it promoted politicians to Congress who primarily committed themselves to cutting government spending and reducing deficits as their primary raison d’être.

But now, as conservative writer Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner wrote, President Donald Trump has thoroughly given up on that central tenet of the movement.

“President Trump once vowed to drain the swamp, but by joining with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the latest budget deal, he has merely drained it of the Tea Party,” Klain wrote.

The new deal doesn’t cut spending at all, and puts the country on track for a trillion-dollar deficit, as Politico reported. There were previous signs, of course, that Trump had no real interest in reducing deficits, despite his contrary promises. The 2017 GOP tax cut was itself a deficit-buster, and its Republican defenders only made half-hearted efforts to pretend that it would create so much growth that it would pay for itself. But the hypocrisy of not counting tax cuts toward the deficit was actually a feature of the Tea Party’s double-talk, too. By agreeing to a budget with a large spending increase, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to give up even this thinnest of pretenses.

This is particularly ironic, given that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a prominent member of the Tea Party and opponent of spending in the House of Representatives. Politico suggests that Mulvaney pushed back against the increase in spending, but his views didn’t prevail. The fact reveals that, as many have argued, the “Tea Party” as it was conceived of by the rank and file — who never really care about deficits — was quite different from the way politicians in Congress portrayed it.

And ultimately, almost no one but handwringing D.C. pundits will care. There’s little sign that the deficit poses a major burden to the country at the moment.

Klein wrote that “Trump’s Republican Party may want to dismiss the importance of the debt, but the numbers don’t lie.” But the “numbers” he cites are just the high debt and deficit, which in themselves don’t prove that there’s anything worth worrying about. It’s possible at some point that interest rates will spike and the American debt burden will get drastically more serious, but deficit hawks have been screaming about this risk for a decade, and it hasn’t happened yet.

The biggest worry, though, is that Republican hypocrisy hasn’t gone away for good. As soon as a Democrat is in control of the White House again, deficit paranoia is certain to overcome the GOP once again. They’ll fight tooth and nail about every minor spending increase the Democratic Party wants, to say nothing of how they’ll react to ambitious spending programs like a Medicare for All proposal. Worst of all, if the next Democratic presidency happens to coincide with another recession, Republicans are guaranteed to point to the deficits that Trump himself expanded as a reason to do nothing to ameliorate the harm. They’ll likely even call for austerity, which would exacerbate the crisis. cf 2 santas

an 916

Congressional Budget Office warns national debt could hit ‘unprecedented levels’ as deficit soars under GOP

Kerry Eleveld / Daily KosJune 26, 2019

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a new report Tuesday warning that the federal debt could reach “unprecedented levels,” sparking what it frames as a “fiscal crisis” unless laws are changed to change…

related?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-this-1971-memo-from-a-conservative-supreme-court-justice-infiltrated-every-institution-in-us-society-and-hoodwinked-american-citizens/

The powers-that-be have progressively neutered Americans politically. They brainwashed them into believing that the government was some third entity instead of the reality that it is we-the-people. This misguidance was a well-orchestrated attack by those who feared Americans were getting too smart, thus putting their wealth supremacy at risk.

The Powell Manifesto was instrumental in the hoodwinking of our citizens. They infiltrated every institution in our society, including schools, churches, and private sector entities. But most importantly it created purported think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that released studies that had the semblance of objectivity, reality, and gravitas that was all but a mirage.

In a recent rant on Politics Done Right, I pointed out that the Plutocracy intends that we see government as some abstract evil entity. Their intent is clear and systematic.

Convince Americans that the government is a separate entity.
They demonize the government by implying it is a separate entity and as such, are without concern that it will alienate we the people since in effect in people’s mind government is no longer we the people.
Make government so unbearably bad that people clamor to privatize all government functions.

Please listen to the entire video.

thom h

no lnx?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-gops-most-successful-scam-is-about-to-reboot-itself/

Get ready to see it on your TV. The GOP is about to kick back into Two Santa Clausesmode and restart the scam they’ve been running since Reagan.

It’ll predictably begin in the first week or two of January, probably first on “Meet the Press” and other Sunday shows that feature “serious thinkers”and only rarely challenge Republicans. It’ll simultaneously roll out on Fox, on right-wing hate radio, and in the conservative media.

And there are more than a few “Third Way” Democrats eager to go along with it.

If successful, not only will Republicans (and corporate-funded Dems) block any genuinely progressive spending legislation in 2019 or 2020, but they’ll prevent any possibility of debt-free college, Medicare for All, or a Green New Deal in the entire next presidential term, clear through 2024 or beyond.

For this remarkably successful 38-year-long GOP head-fake strategy, you can thank a guy named Jude Wanniski.

Odds are you’ve never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a “successful” president, Republicans only rarely would have taken control of the House or Senate, and neither George Bush would have been president.

It all began in 1964, when Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious and massive defeat. Most Republicans felt doomed, among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski. They had to come up with a new message, he knew, instead of just “drugs are bad,” “school segregation is good,” and “Democrats are communists.”

But what? The GOP seemed totally out of ideas. They floated a series of initiatives through the ’60s, mostly previewing Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and their anti-Soviet rhetoric, but nothing caught fire.

Then came 1974, as Nixon went down in flames even harder than Goldwater had, and Ford would soon follow: Jude Wanniski decided he’d had enough.

It’s the Gift Economy, Stupid

Wanniski concluded that if the GOP was to have a new message, it would have to be all about the economy.

The problem for the GOP was that the Democrats, since FDR, had gotten to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks—both programs of the New Deal—as well as when their “big government” projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built, giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers.

From the 1930s to the time Wanniski wrote his opus magnum in the Wall Street Journal, Democrats—who almost continuously controlled the House of Representatives where all taxing and spending must originate—kept high taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things. This kept the national debt in decline, and kept working people happy (working-class wages were steadily going up, in fact faster than the wages of CEOs).

The net effect of these entirely reasonable policies was that the Democrats seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for poor and working-class voters. Or, as Wanniski noted, Santa Clauses.

Americans loved it, Wanniski knew. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, calling for cuts to Social Security, blocking infrastructure or cutting aid to education, they lost elections.

Supply-Side Economics

In 1974 he invented a new phrase—“supply-side economics”—and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn’t because people had money and bought things with it but, instead, because wealthy people made things available for sale. And the way to increase “stuff,” he theorized, was to give big tax cuts to corporations and rich “investors.”

In 1976, he rolled out to the Republican Party (through the Wall Street Journal) his “Two Santa Clauses” theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next 30-plus years.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be “Santa Clauses” by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Social Security, child tax credits, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food and housing assistance, subsidies of college education (student loans were largely unheard of in 1980), infrastructure, new schools and hospitals, airports and Amtrak—the list went on and on. And voters loved all that stuff.

Republicans, Wanniski said, had to come up with their own Santa Claus strategy, or they’d never seriously hold power again.

It was simple, really.

When Republicans are in power, they should be “tax-cut Santas.” Cut taxes radically, and thus drive up the national debt, without ever talking much about the debt (this latter part wasn’t in the article but was adopted later by the GOP).

When Democrats take power, though, everything changes. Republicans should scream so loud about the national debt that they’d intimidate Democrats into shooting their own Santa Claus by cutting all those benefits the American people so loved.

It was a twofer.

If the GOP could pull it off with sufficient discipline—and in the late ’70s and early ’80s their billionaire donors threw big money into think tanks and PR machines to make it happen and keep it going—the American people would always think of the Republicans as the tax-cut Santas, and the Democrats as the scrooges who were trying to keep “average voters” from having their share of the tax-cut toys under the tree.

Horse and Sparrow Economics

This new idea of “trickle-down economics” wasn’t actually new; in the late 19th century it was called “horse and sparrow economics,” on the theory that if one fed more oats to the horses, there’d be more undigested grain left over in the horse poop for the sparrows to eat. (Seriously!) But the “supply side” marketing was pure 20th-century Madison Avenue.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept to build a strong economy, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, he drew on his napkin, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense—and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies—but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.

Wanniski, Laffer, Stephen Moore and their billionaire backers convinced the Reagan campaign to embrace supply-side economics in the 1980 election, and George Herbert Walker Bush—like most Republicans of the time—was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski’s supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we’d face disaster.

But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell the scam of supply-side economics, and use it to get Republicans elected.

Two Santa Clauses Wins

And it has worked.

The last two presidents to present balanced budgets to Congress (and get them passed) were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Clinton famously “ended welfare as we know it,” radically cutting back on LBJ’s Great Society programs that had nearly cut in half the U.S. poverty rate in the 1960s and ’70s.

While Obama was able to get through an initial stimulus in 2009 (Republicans were as panicked as Democrats), even his signature Affordable Care Act had to be revenue-neutral, or even cut the deficit, to get it through Congress.

Sunday Show Hosts

Following their Two Santa Clauses script, the GOP was talking debt, debt, debt on nearly every Sunday show, every week, for all of Obama’s eight years.

Of course, these same commentators were silent when Republican presidents were in office, and the Sunday hosts seemed oddly amnesiac.

Reagan, Bush, Bush (and now Trump) all—every one of them—proposed and signed budgets that massively increased the national debt, year after year, relentlessly.

And during their GOP presidencies, like today (until the Dems take control of the House), the “conservative” pundits mostly kept quiet about the debt, focusing instead on feigned outrage over seemingly irrelevant things like the coming “gun confiscation,” the “War on Christmas,” inner-city violence (by black people), and the “immigration crisis” that involved brown people.

Meanwhile, out of sight of the American public, the nation’s total debt grew so high that whenever the Democrats took power, the Sunday-show Republicans started screaming about the “unsustainable debt!!!”

Like Pavlov and his dog, average people would freak out and join the Republicans in demanding that Democrats “cut all that spending!”

And with the cuts, Republicans knew, the Democrats would be shooting their own Santa Clauses.

Year after year, it worked brilliantly.

Wanniski Declares Victory

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, in particular the “Gingrich Revolution” of 1994,Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:

Ed Crane, then-president of the libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:

“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you [Republicans] don’t cut spending.”

The result, in addition to several Republicans winning the presidency, is clear. Today’s national debt is almost entirely the invention of the Republican Party, using Laffer and Wanniski’s strategy.*

If you’re seeing the pattern here, it’s because it’s obvious. Republicans pour on the tax cuts and spending increases, year after year, whenever they have the power to do so, to intentionally inflate the national debt.

When a Democratic president is in office, however, or even (like 2019) when Democrats control part or all of Congress and want to go big, the Republicans in on this long con scream about the debt on every show, every day.

When Jude Wanniski died, conservative George Gilder celebrated the genius of his Two Santa Claus theory in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:

“...Jude’s charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”

And, indeed, Wanniski’s Two Santa Claus theory defied every tenet of rational economics, including those put forward by Nobel Prize winners.

In simple reality, his tax cuts for the rich did what they have always done over the past 100 years: they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very wealthy skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.

Will It Work Again?

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work. They held power for nearly 40 years, skimmed trillions of dollars out of the economy, gutted organized labor, and packed the Supreme Court and the entire federal court system.

Best of all, though, for the Two Santa Claus GOP, the years since 1981 have left such a massive national debt that some misguided “conservative” Democrats will again be clamoring to shoot Santa with cuts to education, infrastructure, health care, and other social programs.

The Two Santa Claus theory isn’t dead, and starting any day now we’ll see the Republicans crank up their debt hysteria. It’s as predictable as the seasons.

Hopefully, though, this time Democrats will point out the massive fraud perpetrated by the GOP since 1981, and begin talking about Two Santa Clauses in the media.

If they don’t, and enough “Third Way” and “New Dem” Democrats get on board with the “deficit hawks” to drag down the New Deal progressives, get ready for the second Trump term.

*For wonks who want the numbers:

The national debt, right now, at about 100 percent of GDP, is large, and servicing that debt costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could find better uses.

That said, though, it’s nowhere near as high as it was after World War II, when we paid it down by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and stimulating the economy with direct-benefit-to-workers programs including infrastructure, union jobs, free college education (the GI Bill), and building a social safety net. We could easily do it again.

For perspective, the national debt first began to explode in the 20th century in the first years of World War II, going from post-Great Depression 48 percent of GDP in 1942 to 70 percent of GDP in 1943.

It hit a peak of 119 percent of GDP in 1946, much higher than today, the first year after the war.

Truman and Eisenhower paid down more than half the national debt, but not by cutting spending. They left in place FDR’s 91 percent top marginal tax rate, with corporate taxes paying about a third of the total federal budget (they now pay about 9 percent).

Truman stimulated the economy with the GI Bill, sending over 7 million vets to college or journeyman training and helping them buy houses. Eisenhower got the debt down to a mere 60 percent of GDP with the stimulus of a national highway system infrastructure program (while, like Truman, keeping taxes high).

Jimmy Carter got the debt-to-GDP ratio went down to 31 percent.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the nation’s debt was a mere $908 billion. He nearly tripled it, to $2.6 trillion, all while talking about the importance of a balanced-budget amendment and the vital role of “fiscal responsibility.”

And then he rolled out supply-side Reaganomics, with the national debt hitting 50 percent in 1989 with Reagan’s last budget, and exploding up to 64 percent in 1993, the last George H.W. Bush budget year.

Clinton came into office, raised taxes on the rich, and lowered the national debt to 55 percent of GDP in 2000 and 2001.[record econ expansion?]

When George W. Bush came into office, Bill Clinton handed him a budget on the edge of surplus; if Bush had done nothing we would have reduced large percentages of the national debt during Bush’s next eight years.

Instead, following Wanniski’s model, Bush put two multi-trillion-dollar illegal wars and a massive trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich on the nation’s credit card, not only massively jacking the debt but crashing the economy.

Thus, the next president—Obama—had to engage in more deficit spending (in the face of Republican refusal to raise taxes on the rich and corporations), further increasing the debt. And Republicans blocked him from raising taxes.

Trump, of course, made his own $1.5 trillion addition to the national debt, and also massively increased military spending, so that next year our nation’s debt is projected to equal 108 percent of GDP or $22.7 trillion, getting us close to post-WWII levels.

Cue the deficit hawks and concern trolls.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.