Jerry Nadler: “Mr. Speaker, there is a real plot here in this Tax Code. In 1981, I do not think Ronald Reagan understood what he was…”

“Mr. Speaker, there is a real plot here in this Tax Code. In 1981, I do not think Ronald Reagan understood what he was doing. It was said for a long time that the Democrats are the party of tax and spend. The Republicans of the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be the party of borrow and spend. From George Washington through Jimmy Carter, the national debt that was accumulated for 200 years when Ronald Reagan took office was a little under $800 billion. The next 12 years of Republican Presidents and half that time, a Republican Senate, that national debt more than quadrupled to $4.3 trillion. David Stockman admitted why. He said they knew what they were doing, because only by deliberately creating multi-hundred billion dollar annual deficits can you politically withstand the demand of the American people for more health care, for decent numbers of nurses in the hospitals, for shoring up Medicare and Social Security.”