The Hartmann Report

02/24/2026

The GOP’s “Two Santas” strategy — cut taxes when a Republican is in the White House, then scream about deficits when a Democrat takes over — has produced exactly what its author, Jude Wanniski, wanted it to produce. Gut the middle class while elevating the Epstein-billionaire class into the stratosphere, making them richer than any pharaoh or king in world history.

Contrary to Republican lies demanding we gut social programs to pay down the national debt, we don’t have a “spending problem” in American government: we have a looting problem.

We were told the tax cuts would pay for themselves but, of course, they didn’t because they were never intended to. That was just the GOP’s dishonest sales pitch on behalf of their wealthy owners. Instead, those tax cuts for the rich paid for stock buybacks, wealth concentration, and the rise of a billionaire class that now uses its fortune to buy media, politicians, and Supreme Court judges who ask, “How high?” when billionaires yell, “Jump!”

Thirty-eight trillion dollars isn’t just an accounting number. It’s the health care people didn’t get, the homes that weren’t built, the student debt that shackled a generation, the schools that went underfunded, and the infrastructure that collapsed.

And the trillion dollars a year we now spend on interest is the bill for Reagan’s, Bush’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s forty-five-year “supply side” experiment.

Americans are just now beginning to realize that none of this was ever really about balanced budgets or “fiscal responsibility.” Instead, it was always about power. About spending like drunken sailors to “make the good times roll” during four GOP presidencies, and squealing like stuck pigs when Clinton, Obama, and Biden — who all tried to cut spending and balance the budget, per Wanniski’s plan — were in office.

Deficits were the weapon. Tax cuts were the bait. And the national debt — and thus the middle class — became the hostage. And the result is exactly what you’d expect if you’d designed a system to starve government of revenue while shoveling unimaginable levels of wealth at the top.

Under this 45-year-long GOP punishment of America’s working people, public schools struggled, health care bankrupted families, housing costs exploded, and college became a lifelong mortgage. Meanwhile, the Epstein-billionaire class grew so large and so politically powerful that it now writes and rewrites tax policy, regulatory policy, media ownership, and even the rules of democracy itself.