SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
");background-position:center;background-size:19px 19px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-color:var(--button-bg-color);padding:0;width:var(--form-elem-height);height:var(--form-elem-height);font-size:0;}:is(.js-newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter_bar.newsletter-wrapper) .widget__body:has(.response:not(:empty)) :is(.widget__headline, .widget__subheadline, #mc_embed_signup .mc-field-group, #mc_embed_signup input[type="submit"]){display:none;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) #mce-responses:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-row:1 / -1;grid-column:1 / -1;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget__body > .snark-line:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-column:1 / -1;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) :is(.newsletter-campaign:has(.response:not(:empty)), .newsletter-and-social:has(.response:not(:empty))){width:100%;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:8px 20px;margin:0 auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .text-element{display:flex;color:var(--shares-color);margin:0 !important;font-weight:400 !important;font-size:16px !important;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .whitebar_social{display:flex;gap:12px;width:auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col a{margin:0;background-color:#0000;padding:0;width:32px;height:32px;}.newsletter-wrapper .social_icon:after{display:none;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget article:before, .newsletter-wrapper .widget article:after{display:none;}#sFollow_Block_0_0_1_0_0_0_1{margin:0;}.donation_banner{position:relative;background:#000;}.donation_banner .posts-custom *, .donation_banner .posts-custom :after, .donation_banner .posts-custom :before{margin:0;}.donation_banner .posts-custom .widget{position:absolute;inset:0;}.donation_banner__wrapper{position:relative;z-index:2;pointer-events:none;}.donation_banner .donate_btn{position:relative;z-index:2;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_0{color:#fff;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_1{font-weight:normal;}.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper.sidebar{background:linear-gradient(91deg, #005dc7 28%, #1d63b2 65%, #0353ae 85%);}
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Scott Bessent's "3-3-3" agenda "requires brutal cuts to health and nutrition and higher costs for families at the grocery store," said analysts at the Center for American Progress.
At his confirmation hearing on Thursday, hedge fund manager and U.S. treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee that at the helm of the Treasury Department he would usher in an "economic golden age."
But a report by two policy analysts details how Bessent's signature "3-3-3" plan would only be achievable by gutting programs for some of the nation's most vulnerable households—extending the "golden age" only to wealthy people and corporations for whom the Trump administration plans to slash taxes.
At the Center for American Progress, senior director of economic policy Brendan Duke and senior director of federal budget policy Bobby Kogan completed "the accounting to determine what it would take to achieve" Bessent's 3-3-3 agenda, particularly his plan to cut the federal budget deficit down to 3% of the gross domestic product (GDP). The plan also calls for real GDP growth to reach 3% and the production of 3 million barrels of oil by 2028.
While reducing the budget deficit and simultaneously protecting programs American families rely on is a "laudable goal," wrote Duke and Kogan, Bessent has "explicitly stated that extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts is a priority, and he would likely rule out tax increases on the wealthy to pay for them"—suggesting that the Treasury nominee's 3-3-3 agenda would require new taxes on imported goods and "massive cuts to anti-poverty programs."
The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the budget deficit will represent 5.8% of the nation's GDP in 2028.
"The president-elect is stacking his cabinet with one goal in mind: more tax breaks for his billionaire boys club and major corporations."
With Bessent proposing an extension of the 2017 tax cuts—which are projected to grow the budget deficit by about $4 trillion over a decade—the elimination of Inflation Reduction Act energy investments, and a pause on nondefense discretionary spending increases, said Duke and Kogan, Bessent's plan would "actually increase the projected 2028 budget deficit from 5.8 to 6.0% of GDP, or $1 trillion above the 3% target.
Without any cuts to Medicare and Social Security—which Trump has said he would exempt from cuts—or defense spending, says the analysis, Bessent's deficit target would require both:
"The combination of policies that would deliver the deficit reduction proposed in Bessent's 3-3-3 economic plan would raise taxes on low- and middle-income families and gut healthcare, nutrition assistance, and veterans' programs while still cutting taxes for the wealthy," wrote Duke and Kogan. "Such a plan would hike families' costs both because broad-based tariffs would increase prices and because Americans would have to pay more for healthcare and food due to cuts to federal programs that help lower the cost of living."
With families across the U.S. facing "brutal cuts to health and nutrition" and higher prices at the grocery store under Bessent's plan, said Duke, the wealthiest households would still get "a net tax cut."
At The Washington Post, columnist Catherine Rampell wrote that "the magnitude of cuts required to make Bessent's arithmetic work is breathtaking."
"If you add up all the tax-cut promises Trump made during his campaign, the budget hole swells to almost $10 trillion," wrote Rampell. "To compensate, government programs would have to shrink by two-thirds. Alternatively, Trump could raise taxes on the middle class. Pick your poison."
On social media, government watchdog Accountable.US denounced Bessent's defense of Trump's tax cuts—under which "the top 1% saw benefits nearly three times larger than families in the bottom 60%"—and of the president-elect's proposed tariffs, which leading economists say would "reignite" inflation.
"Scott Bessent's nomination isn't about helping American families," said the group. "It's about lining the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and doubling down on policies that hurt the middle class."
Meanwhile, critics of Bessent on Thursday pointed to new reporting from Politico that Senate Democrats have accused the Treasury nominee of dodging $910,182 in Medicare taxesfor income he made through his hedge fund from 2021-23. A memo circulated by Democrats stated that Bessent argued that as a "limited partner" in his fund, he was not liable for taxes on certain income.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) addressed the memo at Bessent's hearing, saying: "Like a number of Wall Street fund managers, Mr. Bessent makes use of a tricky legal maneuver to opt out of paying into Medicare."
"The billionaire hedge fund manager Trump handpicked to oversee a massive tax giveaway for the ultra-wealthy doesn't pay his own taxes," said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative. "It's almost too on the nose. The president-elect is stacking his cabinet with one goal in mind: more tax breaks for his billionaire boys club and major corporations."
If you want to make social investments, it's important to recognize that vast amounts of capital held by the rich are just sitting around waiting to be put to good social use.
Back in 1933, the journalist-turned-lawyer Wesley Lloyd turned into a new member of Congress from Washington State. Two months into his first term, Lloyd rose to address his fellow lawmakers. They had all, he related, so far applied little more than “palliatives” to the continuing Great Depression.
“We have subsidized the farmer and charged the cost to labor,” Lloyd observed, “and we are attempting to subsidize labor and propose to let the farmer pay the bill.”
What Congress needed to do instead: “lay the ax of legislative enactment at the tap root” of what had gone wrong in America and “place a definite limitation on the acquisition and ownership of wealth.”
“A startlingly small number of our people,” Lloyd charged, had come to enjoy a “vastly major proportion of our national wealth.” His answer: a constitutional amendment giving Congress the power “to limit the wealth” of individual Americans to no more than $1 million, the equivalent of about $23 million today.
“I propose in the main,” said Lloyd, “to bring up the poor and bring down the rich into the class of the average man, where all may find real happiness and where we may know a widespread national prosperity.”
Over the next dozen years, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the United States would make historically unprecedented progress toward that greater equality Lloyd so deeply desired. By 1945, America’s richest faced a 94 percent tax rate on income over $200,000. Lloyd, sadly, wouldn’t be around to see that progress. He died early in 1936, midway through his second term.
But Lloyd’s tax-the-rich spirit lives on, especially today in his home Washington State. Earlier this year, 19 of the state’s senators and 43 state reps introduced legislation that would fix a first-ever 1 percent annual tax on stocks, bonds, and other forms of “intangible personal property” worth over $250 million. The Evergreen State currently hosts over 700 grand fortunes that top this quarter-billion mark.
The holders of these massive accumulations have — for now at least — dodged this proposed annual 1 percent tax on their “financial intangible property.” The proposal failed to get through the 2023 state legislative session. But that failure hasn’t left Washington’s deepest pockets feeling like celebrating. The reason? They’ve just become subject to another new tax, a measure that Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat is describing as the state’s first-ever “wealth-related levy.”
This particular levy, a 7-percent excise tax on asset-sale profits over $250,000, actually became law two years ago, then got shelved when a county court ruled the new tax unconstitutional. This past March, a state Supreme Court ruling reversed that county ruling, and wealthy Washingtonians are now paying up on their new taxes due — at much higher levels than the state’s legislative number-crunchers had anticipated!
Those analysts had expected Washington’s new 7-percent capital gains tax to raise $440 million from the state’s richest. The new tax has instead so far raised $849 million, almost double the take originally anticipated.
Washington’s wealthy still, to be sure, have plenty to be thankful for at tax time. Washington, for instance, remains without an income tax. But no state, we need to remember, has yet come up with what analysts at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities would see as a perfect package of tax reforms that prioritize “equity and fairness.”
The Center is now hoping to nudge state lawmakers nationwide further in that direction with a new online tool for developing “State Revenue Options for Advancing Equity and Prosperity.” State policymakers, the Center notes, don’t always understand “how much revenue different policies might raise, whether a tax will fall more on families with low incomes or people at the top.” The new Center tool aims to build that understanding.
Understanding, of course, only takes lawmakers so far. They still have to overcome the opposition of the richest among us to paying anything close to their fair tax share. Lawmakers can certainly do that overcoming — if enough of us push them. And if we do enough of that pushing, maybe our lawmakers will start sounding like Wesley Lloyd back when he proposed to limit the personal wealth of our super richest.
“I do not seek to destroy wealth or industry,” Lloyd told his fellow members of Congress, “but I do propose to place the burden of public expense and national development upon the shoulders of those best able to bear that burden and those who have profited most. I would have the strong help the weak rather than have the weak forever carrying the strong.”
This isn't a crisis. This is a plot.The corporate media refuses to tell the American people what this 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.
"The only thing wrong with the U.S. economy is the failure of the Republican Party to play Santa Claus." —Jude Wanniski, March 6, 1976
As the Fitch credit rating service puts the United States on “watch” for a possible downgrade and Democrats dither about the 14th Amendment, Republicans just declared the House of Representatives in a break because, from their point of view, there really is no crisis.
In fact, from the GOP’s perspective, it’s all going according to plan.
As Teagan Goddard’s Political Wirenoted yesterday:
“RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News that the U.S. potentially defaulting on its debt ‘bodes very well for the Republican field.’”
It’s no accident or coincidence that the threat of a failure to pay the nation’s bills never once happened during the presidencies of Reagan, Bush, Bush, or Trump. Or that it did happen every single time during the presidencies of Clinton, Obama…and, now, Biden.
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 American 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 Republican presidencies produced three results:
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 “we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!”
The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.
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.
Do whatever it takes, the strategy goes: use the 1917 Liberty Bond debt ceiling to shut down the government, crash the stock market, and damage US credibility around the world if necessary.
This will force the Democratic president in the White House to cut his own social safety net programs and even 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 again with a Democrat in the White House.
Which is why, following Wanniski’s script, Republicans are again squealing about the national debt and saying they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling, possibly crashing the US economy.
And, once again, the media is preparing to cover it as a “Debt Ceiling 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.
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 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 earned 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 $32 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 rich beneficiaries of those tax cuts.
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.
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.
And, with Newt Gingrich using the formerly obscure weapon of the “debt ceiling” — a vestige of the 1917 Liberty Bond Act that nobody had paid attention to in living memory — that’s just how it turned out.
Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas and the newly-discovered “debt ceiling,” 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.
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 buckled under the threat of the debt ceiling, 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 Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy with brutal “debt ceiling” threats, 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:
“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.
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.
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. Using the “debt ceiling” argument — essentially Two Santas in drag — Republicans have forced two Democratic presidents, and are about to force a third, to gut-shoot the Democratic Santa established by FDR.
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 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.
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 reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding several 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 $8 trillion.
Hopefully this time Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam.
There was not a peep 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.
Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by over $7 trillion, and 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, 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 now Republicans are using the debt ceiling debate 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 debt-ceiling default crashes the economy, all the better: Republicans can just blame Biden: it’ll increase the chances of Republican victories in 2024!
Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated, and by whom.
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 strategy for decades, none of the national media have ever seriously examined this 40+ year GOP strategy.
Hopefully this time Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam. And put an end to it once and for all with the constitutional remedies of the 14th Amendment and the “take care” clause of the Constitution’s Article II.
If not, get ready for Biden to cave in just like Clinton and Obama did, demoralizing progressives and cutting Democratic turnout in 2024.
Or, even worse, if McCarthy can’t hold his caucus together, prepare for an all-out economic disaster — a second Republican Great Depression — followed by an openly fascistic second Trump presidency or something very much like it.
Spread the word.