Hypocrisy is Official: Even Newt Gingrich Admits the "Fiscal Cliff" is a Scam

commentary by Roger Erickson

Yet even this fellow below falls back on assuming that the politicians still in Congress know less than Newt ... "obviously"?

Who's scamming whom?  Not another Atkins diet!

Can we, or can we not, scam all of the people all of the time?

If not, then how do we determine who's scamming whom, at what time?

If anyone can mass produce a Scamometer, I can sell a billion of 'em. Tomorrow.

It'd be the perfect scam, Sherlock!   A 47% solution!

[A non-scam cleverly disguised as a scam. Should sell like hotcakes, made with whole grain & real maple syrup. Problem would be supply.]

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Even Newt Gingrich knows the "fiscal cliff" is a scam

by David Atkins

Deficit hysteria is an integral part of the Republican Party's starve-the-beast economic sabotage. The idea is to spend like crazy on wars, tax cuts for the rich and boondoggles to favored corporate interests, blow the up the deficit, and then declare a crisis, demanding spending cuts that directly hurt people as human sacrifices to the Bond Lords, Confidence Fairies, and other Objectivist gods.

But when curbing deficits actually means increasing taxes on the wealthy, suddenly those who are more interested in preserving their bloated offshore bank accounts than in their ideology find that the scam doesn't look so good after all.

One such huckster is none other than Newt Gingrich, who stopped by Simi Valley and had this to say:

Politician and author Newt Gingrich, speaking in Simi Valley on Wednesday night, said there is no pending "fiscal cliff."

The "fiscal cliff is a fantasy. It is an excuse to panic," said the former speaker of the House and candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Gingrich told a sold-out audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum that the fiscal cliff is a way to scare politicians into raising taxes.

"It is a device to get all of us running down the road so we accept whatever Obama wants, because otherwise we will have failed the fiscal cliff, and how can you be a patriot if you don't do what the fiscal cliff requires?" Gingrich said.

Gingrich, of course, frames the whole deal as a con of the President's creation to raise taxes. He's a gasbag. But the point remains that he knows it's a scam, and doesn't want to see his precious wealth impacted by an artificial deficit crisis.

The only people who don't know it's a scam are the Very Serious People in the beltway, their ideological friends, and those disconnected 20% who depend more on the stock market for their retirement and their wealth than on their actual wages plus medicare and social security.

It may well be that going over the cliff is temporarily bad for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and might impact a few 401Ks for a while. But the Dow Jones has been doing extremely well as the rest of the country suffers. Maybe it's time the Dow Jones investor class crowd felt a little bit of the pinch, too, rather than people on fixed incomes and those who depend on Medicaid.