Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years

[kentuck]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0

<snip>

Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they're successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would 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.


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[tsuki]

1. The two Santa Clauses. Thom Hartmann has talked about this for years. nt

[Ramulux]

2. I suggest that everyone on this site read this

This is a great article with a lot of important points that everyone should know. I also suggest reading the comments, there is some decent back and forth between some intelligent people who really know their stuff.

[Martin Eden]

3. Excellent Synopsis

One glaring error, irrelevant to the case he' making:
"Even four years later when Richard Nixon beat LBJ in 1968"
(Hubert H Humphrey was the Dem candidate in 1968)

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

4. Nutshell: Spend like drunken sailors when in power, cry "Deficits!" when out of power.