Late in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." President George W. Bush wanted huge tax cuts in 2002, but O'Neill wondered how they were going to be paid for, and so he asked questions about the deficits. He was soon fired and replaced, for that.
On 25 May 2001, the anti-tax radical (and Reagan protà ©gà ©) Grover Norquist said on NPR's "Morning Edition": "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." He was referring only to taxes, not really to spending (which many naà ¯fs interpreted him to mean). Virtually every Republican congressional candidate thus signed Norquist's "No New Taxes Pledge," in order to qualify for Norquist's massive campaign-funding from corporate America.
On 21 June 2012, the Wall Street Journal headlined "Norquist: No-Tax Pledge at New Peak," and reported that 534 Republican congressmen and challengers had signed his pledge, compared with just 449 in 2010 (when Republicans retook control of the House).
In fact, just soon after President Bush II came into office, this Republican strategy was further explained in Nicholas LeMann's "Bush's Trillions: How to Buy the Republican Majority of Tomorrow," in the New Yorker on 19 February 2001, in which a leading Republican Congressman, soon-to-become Senator, South Carolina's Jim DeMint (and now the head of the far-right Heritage Foundation), was quoted as saying, "Today, fewer and fewer people pay taxes, and more and more are dependent on government. Every day, the Republican Party is losing constituents, because every day more people vote themselves more benefits without paying for it." (To the Republican Party's financial backers, the recipients of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are basically lazy-bum scammers who exploit these "job-creators" -- who instead live off of capital gains and dividends and interest and executive bonuses and "golden parachutes." In other words: big Republican donors despise their own -- and others' -- salaried employees, so much as to begrudge them their meager hard-earned social-insurance "entitlements." That's the reality.)
Their goal, therefore, is to loosen the bond between voters and government, either by shrinking, or by privatizing, Social Security, Medicare, public schools, and other Democratic programs (programs from which the middle class and poor benefit). And the best way to force that to happen is to starve government of funds for such programs. It's called "Starve the Beast." (That phrase actually originated in the Reagan Administration.) If the public comes to hate government, for its failing to provide these services well, that's good for the Republican Party: the public's disgust with government will cause more and more Republicans to replace Democrats in Congress, and the White House to become a virtually permanent Republican enclave, because the Republican Party favors "small government." As Ronald Reagan (who soared the debt) himself phrased it, in his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." So, his man, Norquist, wanted to "drown it in the bathtub." Reaganauts soared the debt in order to force cuts in Democratic programs. Their goal was and is to refocus government upon expenses from which the public benefits the least. (E.g.: Overspend on the military, in order to gut S.S., etc.) Since their ultimate aim is to shrink government services to the public, they drive the government so deeply into debt that slashing government spending on Democratic programs -- especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- will be "forced." This "Starve the Beast" strategy actually originated with Milton Friedman.
Deficits are thus an essential part of the Republican strategy, to win their ultimate one-party rule. That's what George W. Bush was trying to do (in addition to privatizing them, such as by Bush's own Medicare Part D program; but privatization makes them Republican, not Democratic).
What Milton Friedman was saying since 1978 has emerged to become the operative Republican strategy since Reagan came into office, and it's still working for them, especially under the "Democrat" Barack Obama.
Obama is trying to complete this program. Here is how he is doing it: via the current debt-limit "negotiations" with congressional Republicans, the sequester, etc.
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