By means of MS Copilot, here’s a fuller exposition of the so-called “Starve the Beast” strategy:
The phrase “Starve the Beast” refers to a political strategy aimed at reducing government spending by cutting taxes, thereby limiting the revenue available to fund government programs. The “strangle in the bathtub” metaphor was famously used by Grover Norquist, a political activist, who said he wanted to reduce the size of government to the point where it could be “dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub”2. This approach has been a topic of debate in discussions about fiscal policy and the role of government…
DSD…..
Starve the beast” is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term “the beast”, in this context, refers to the United States federal government and the programs it funds, primarily with American tax money, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
On July 14, 1978, economist and future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified to the Senate Finance Committee: “Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.”
Before his election as President, then-candidate Ronald Reagan foreshadowed the strategy during the 1980 US Presidential debates, saying “John Anderson tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”
The earliest known use of “starve the beast” is in a 1979 newspaper article quoting Santa Rosa, California city councilman Jerry Wilhelm at a tax forum sponsored by the Libertarian Party.….
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Lobbyist Grover Norquist is a well-known proponent of the strategy and has famously said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”….
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