Chris Hayes is usually smarter than this

[KY_EnviroGuy]

11. Two Santa Clauses theory at work. Hayes is right.....

the Repugs have us boxed in AGAIN. They will completely flip their campaign dogma for 2020 and start screaming "reduce the deficit" and "cut more spending" and "Democrats will raise your taxes out the roof for welfare programs" and "big government will return again". They've done this to us at least twice already and unless a miracle happens, they're clearly in the process of doing it again....

This is the best summary I've read from 2009 on how this was designed and how it's played out since the '70s:

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

Read it here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/01/26/two-santa-clauses-or-how-republican-party-has-conned-america-thirty-years

(snips)

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. 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 ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.

But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.

Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

That process described in the article needs to be engraved into every Democrat's brain so we can work toward permanently breaking the cycle. We must somehow make Americans aware of this destructive long-term scam, or else this alternating Democrat/Republican government cycle they have us stuck in will slowly destroy us..............