Mitt Romney: A Monument to American Gullibility

.

Every time the American people look at Mitt Romney they should get angry, because he’s the walking, breathing, personification of the biggest scam ever perpetrated on America, "trickle down" economics. Romney is the very embodiment of trickle-down economics returning to rub our stupidity in our face, right down to his cynical pauses . . . and sideways half-smile that seems to say, "Now, let’s see if you’re dumb enough to swallow this load of crap, yet again." He’s such a cynical, insincere, and obvious con man that if he didn’t exist Saturday Night Live would have created him. He’s as stiff and emotion free as Max Headroom, and just as contrived: "Yes, my good friends, and what I love most about your fair city is the height of the trees." What!!!?

Trickle Down, or Supply- Side Economics, which came to be known as "Reaganomics," was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. Sound familiar? According to the scheme, the resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan's vice president to be, called it "voodoo economics."

.
Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed. Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country millions of jobs, and the country itself, its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 - fifteen years before the Great Depression.
.
Even though this scheme has brought economic disaster to the American people several times in the past thirty years, the Republican party continues to repackage it and trot it back out every eight years or so. They tend to wait until after the Democrats have rescued the nation, and their previous disaster has retreated from the collective memory of the American electorate.
.
Clear evidence of that is in spite of Ronald Reagan's grandiose promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit, by the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president in history, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined.
.
Reagan tripled the national debt. It went from $712 billion in 1980 to $2,052 billion in 1988. And what was the Republican Party’s plan to deal with that disaster? In it’s "contract with America" (Republicans are real good with slogans), Newt Gingrich’s Republican-run congress proposed a capitol gains tax cut, for the rich.
.
It took Democrat, Bill Clinton, to rescue the nation. David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, said the following regarding Bill Clinton’s presidency:
.
"The Clinton years were unquestionably a time of progress, especially on the economy [...] Clinton's 1992 slogan, 'Putting people first,' and his stress on 'the economy, stupid,' pitched an optimistic if still gritty populism at a middle class that had suffered under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. [...] By the end of the Clinton presidency, the numbers were uniformly impressive. Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black Americans, and the aged."
.On September 27, 2000, CNN reported:
.
President Clinton announced Wednesday that the federal budget surplus for fiscal year 2000 amounted to at least $230 billion, making it the largest in U.S. history and topping last year's record surplus of $122.7 billion. ‘This represents the largest one-year debt reduction in the history of the United States." 

Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)