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Mitch McConnell is burning down the country so he can collect the insurance money.

At the time the Trump tax plan was passed, economist on both sides said pretty much the same things. It would inflate the deficit. It would lead to stock buy backs, not new investment. It would mostly go to a small group of people who are already wealthy. The GOP didn’t even bother to debate this point. They repeated talking points and shoved the bill through without debate. Without Democratic amendments. Without a second thought.

Bruce Bartlett was talking about this in 2012. It was called the “Two-Santa Theory” and it dates back to 1976 and was a core part of the Reagan years.

I want people to consider a second term for it. “Burning down the country to collect the insurance money”

The idea is simple. You run up the debt. You privatize everything, transferring it to the same people who got bags of cash in the form of tax giveaways and subsidies. You then loot the nation’s insurance fund, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to pay for it all. You burn the country down. You then fix the damage by collecting the insurance.

“New Treasury Department analysis on Monday revealed that corporate tax cuts had a significant impact on the deficit this year. Federal revenue rose by 0.04 percent in 2018, a nearly 100 percent decrease on last year’s 1.5 percent. In fiscal year 2018, tax receipts on corporate income fell to $205 billion from $297 billion in 2017.

Still, McConnell insisted that the change had nothing to do with a lack of revenue or increased spending and instead was due to entitlement and welfare programs. The debt, he said, was very “disturbing” and driven by “the three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.… There’s been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs. Hopefully, at some point here, we’ll get serious about this.””

Call it what it is, burning down the country to collect the insurance money.

From: newsweek.com https://www.newsweek.com/deficit-budget-tax-plan-social-security-medicaid-medicare-entitlement-1172941

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Using the military as a campaign prop. Nothing new.

Hey, remember the last republican president? The one before Obama.

He used the military as a campaign prop. He politicized national intelligence. He made it office US policy to torture people. He used pardons to keep his advisors out of jail. He blocked investigations. He used shill media. He complained that the media was unfair. All of it.

If you pretend this all started with Trump, you’ll never be able to actually address the problem, let alone fix it.

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Ann Coulter isn’t attacking Trump, she’s defending her brand.

The golden rule of wingnut welfare is always defend the brand and that brand is the magical True Conservatism that exists in the minds of Fox News viewers from sea to shining sofa. In their mind, that brand is Reagan shouting Merry Christmas from a pick up truck loaded with medium rare rib-eyes firing off 55 grain FMJ AR-15 rounds while triggered liberals cower at the display of a Real American being Really American.

That’s who Coulter is talking to. That’s the brand.

She knows that the wall is more divisive to Republicans than Democrats. She knows that Trump is in trouble. She knows he’s defending himself incompetently. And now she is setting up her exit from the Trump train. In a year or two she will proudly and confidently declare that Trump was never a True Conservative. That he was a Democrat all along. Conservatism can no fail, it can only be failed and Trump has failed it.

So while it’s tempting to think that Never Trumpers and No-Longer Trumpers have somehow seen the light and somehow get it, keep in mind that in the same way the’ll toss Trump under the bus to defend the brand, they’ll shiv you in a heartbeat to defend the brand.

So ignore her. Don’t give her the attention she wants. Focus your energy on the hundreds of liberal pundits that have been right about Trump from the moment he came down the escalator.

And when they attempt to reboot the brand like they did when Tea Party came around, don’t fall for it and point out this is just the same con artists playing the same con for the same wingnut welfare.

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To Fight Democrats’ First Bill, GOP Calls in Discredited Advocates of Voter Suppression

This is a long game tactic and worth the time and effort in pushing it.

Everything that the democrats do to make it easier to vote will work to prevent the GOP from stacking the deck. Automatic voter registration. Election day as a holiday. Early voting, upgraded voting stations, mandating the the number of polling places to minimize the wait times. All of these help people vote.

The goal should be to make it impossible for red state Republicans to nullify voting at the local level.

The counter narrative to the GOP push back should be to cast the GOP as being on the side of government bureaucrats rather than demanding that government make it easier for people to vote not make it easier for bureaucrats to justify their jobs.

“Von Spakovsky and Adams were key members of President Donald Trump’s controversial election integrity commission, which shut down after failing to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. For more than a decade, they have led an aggressive push to make it harder to vote and have spread false claims about fraud. Their credibility has also been called into question recently by federal courts.”

motherjones.com

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GOP has handed Democrats a pair of wedge issues to use against them.

One of the reasons why I am so happy to see the GOP fighting over the wall is that the wall is a bigly divisive issue; but it’s only bigly divisive on the right. There is a chunk of the GOP base that loves the idea of a wall and there are National Review reading, free trade loving country club Republicans that hate the idea of burning a big pile of their tax dollars on a useless pile of concrete that creates real problems while solving only imaginary ones. Almost 1/4 of republicans oppose the wall, while only 13% of democrats support a wall. (From PEW)

The wall divides the GOP while it unites the Dems. It’s a wedge issue, but the sharp part of the wedge is pointed toward the GOP and away from the Dems.

The same goes for DACA. There are strong majorities in support for giving dreamers a path to citizenship in the general population, nearly 3/4 according to the same PEW poll are in favor. While 92% of Democrats support DACA, there is a 50/40 split among Republicans.

This is why narcissists rarely make good leaders. Trump is so fixated on what his base and his favored pundits think of him that he is unable to see how much he is alienating potential 2020 GOP voters.

The GOP has just handed the Democrats a pair of wedge issues to use against them. Pick them up and use them. Make the next two years about the Wall and DACA. Make this all about Trump’s fixation on a wall. Let large numbers of GOP voters get frustrated over the lack of action on anything because of the fixation on the wall.