Former policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, and former Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary under George HW Bush, Bruce Bartlett utterly demolishes every single major Teapublican’t talking point. For instance:
*”When Bush took office, we had a debt of about $6 trillion. The projections from the CBO were that we were going to run a $6 trillion surplus. By this point, if we had done nothing, we would have paid off the debt, but we added about $3 trillion of tax cuts…”
*”The Republicans keep saying the tax cuts are the key to prosperity. The 2000s are evidence that that is not true. We had booming economies in the 1980s and ’90s. If we went back to those taxes, we would be better off.”
*”Ronald Reagan raised the capital gains rate, and now it’s only 15%, and of course the wealthier you are, the more of your income comes from capital gains.”
*”[Republicans] go around saying they did not lose any revenue [from tax cuts]. A number of prominent officials, Mitch McConnell included, have said this. It’s just mathematically ridiculous.”
*”The Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act was essentially the same thing as the Reps themselves…The Heritage Foundation, much more recently than that, proposed an individual mandate”
And finally, the coup de grace from this former top Reagan/Bush official:
*”Yeah, I think a good chunk of the Republican caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant or craven cowards, who are desperately afraid of the tea party people, and rightly so.”
Any further questions?
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