Here's a transcript of Thom Hartmann explaining it:
So this was the goal: to strip America of small 'd' democracy and replace it with an autocracy. How to go about doing it? How do you achieve maximum power in a nation where the vast majority of the people would really rather not have a small group have maximum power? You do it with the Two Santa Claus Theory.
this was Barack Obama identifying, broadly speaking, the issue. He continued:
"This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle."
See, and this, this is such an important point. This was not a normal turn of the business cycle and it was not an accident of history. This was intentional. it started with a group of conservatives saying, you know, 'how can we do this? What can we, let's make this thing happen'.
This goes back to a guy named Jude Wanniski, who, back in the 70s, laid out the blueprint for this whole thing, for the theft of American government. He and Grover Norquist were the guys who really put this thing together. Jude Wanniski invented the term "supply side economics". It was a revolutionary thing.
As Robert Novak wrote in 2005 in Real Clear Politics, his column, his nationally syndicated column, he says, "The late supply-side pioneer Jude Wanniski wrote about two governmental Santa Clauses -- one bestowing spending increases and the other tax cuts. For 50 years until the supply-side revolution in the late 1970s, Republicans rejected both Santa Clauses and cemented their minority political status."
You get this? Historically, Republicans were opposed tax cuts. They thought that a balanced budget was a good thing. And historically the Republicans were opposed to government spending. Now, what Jude Wanniski did is, he came along and he said, 'you can, Republicans, you can now be in favor of tax cuts. You can be a Santa Claus to the American people, because we've invented this thing called the Laffer curve, and we've come up with this idea called 'supply side economics' that says if you cut taxes you're actually going to raise revenue.
It was a lie then, it's a lie now. It has never worked although it still has it's apologists out there. But this was one of the most despicable and intentional lies of the conservatives and the Republicans to gain power.
Cato Institute president Ed Crane in an article about Wanniski titled, "The GOP: Slouching towards Irrelevance" talked about how this guy gave it to the Republicans. He said, "When [U.S. Representatives]", now this was a decade or more ago he wrote this. "When [U.S. Representatives] Jack Kemp, New 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... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments."
And this is why this year, if you are an average tax payer in the United States, if you're making in the neighborhood of $45-50,000, about a thousand bucks of your federal tax bill is going to pay the interest on the money that Ronald Reagan borrowed following Jude Wanniski's and Grover Norquist's advice.About another $2,000 of the taxes that you're paying this year is going to pay the interest on the money that George Herbert Walker Bush, the first couple of years of the Clinton administration and George W Bush in particular borrowed, following the advice of Grover Norquist and Jude Wanniski.
If we don't understand how this happened, we can't fix it.
First hour, 1/9/09.
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