In The Big Con, his seminal work on American grifting, and the book that was responsible for most of the best chatter in The Sting, linguist David Maurer provided a handy encyclopedia of the lingo used for the purpose of extracting a mark’s cash from his possession. One of these terms was “the office,” which Maurer defined as, “…a cluck with the tongue or velar fricative used as a signal for the mob while the mark was being played.”

In the crooked casino now in operation in the national legislature, as various con men and grifters prepare to pillage whatever of the national wealth they have not shoved upwards already, the office is not sub-verbal. The office for this mob is a set of very precise phrases of which you will hear a lot over the next few months.

“Middle class,” is one. “Small business” is another. Here is another, exhaled by Trump economic guru Steve Cohen this morning on CNBC.

Tax cuts will pay for themselves through growth.

No, for the love of the everloving, eternal god, they don’t. They never do. We’ve tried this twice and the deficit went to Neptune both times and wretched recessions resulted. If you don’t believe me, believe the guy who first promulgated this nonsense to President Ronald Reagan, and who appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post.

Based on this logic, tax cuts became the GOP’s go-to solution for nearly every economic problem. Extravagant claims are made for any proposed tax cut. Wednesday, President Trump argued that “our country and our economy cannot take off” without the kind of tax reform he proposes. Last week, Republican economist Arthur Laffer said, “If you cut that [corporate] tax rate to 15 percent, it will pay for itself many times over. … This will bring in probably $1.5 trillion net by itself.” That’s wishful thinking. So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting. In reality, there’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.

If you want to spot the moment in time in which the Republican Party first rejected the empirical and embraced unreason as a political identity, don’t look to the Religious Right, look to the day Reagan and his people took supply-side economics seriously. That’s the first bowlful of monkeybrains that the GOP ate. That’s where the prion disease first took hold. Supply-side never made sense as economics; when George H. W. Bush called it “voodoo economics,” he said the truest thing he ever said in public. It was less economics than it was a kind of conjuring spell. It was El Mystico’s block of flats from Monty Python. It required faith as described by Paul in Hebrews as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. This makes for fine theology, but it makes for terrible math. The Republican party opted for the theology and abandoned the math and, once you’ve done that, you’re willing to believe anything.

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We’re seeing that today, as this grotesque parody of a “tax reform” is sold by the mob’s office all over television. This morning, speaking to the MSNBC Morning Zoo crew, Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, and the leader of the Freedom Caucus mob in the House, clucked the office just as David Maurer defined it.

One of the principles that many of the conservatives espouse to is that, if you lower that rate, what you get is actually greater economic growth, and that GDP growth will make up for much of the deficit. You may get a deficit in the short run, but you can make a very compelling case that over the next 15 years, if we’re really aggressive and bold on reducing these tax rates, not only for individuals and small businesses and corporations, that what you can do, as long as you don’t grow the government along with that, is balance over a 15-year period.

This is pure moonshine, mendacious wishful thinking and, of course, there also arises the now customary Republican mock-concern over The Deficit, which pops up every time there’s a Democratic president and/or every time the country’s real owners pull the strings of their legislative marionettes. In fact, one of them pretty much gave the game away in The New York Times on Thursday.

A new tax cut is emerging to rival those of the Bush years, and the deficit hawks have hardly peeped. “It’s a great talking point when you have an administration that’s Democrat-led,” said Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of about 150 conservative House members. “It’s a little different now that Republicans have both houses and the administration.”

As with all other things, the election of the president* has encouraged all Republicans to start saying the quiet things out loud in almost every area of our public life. As David Maurer would put it, he’s the “roper.” Guess what we are.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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