Oh, Lord, don't get me started. Add to that Big Pharma and Big Ag using government research to better their products and increase their profits, and we lose again. And again. And again.
Thanks to President Reagan and David Stockman, "trickle down" has become the mantra of Republicans tax policy. As long as their corporate backers keep getting tax breaks, Republicans will consistently vote to reduce taxes for them, while punishing low-income people by reducing their SNAP benefits and piling on work requirements. Are we a great country or what?
The irony being that the term "trickle down" was used first by FDR during an Oct. 1932 campaign speech in Detroit. He rejected the market fundamentalists of that era who, he said, claimed that "if we make the rich richer, somehow that will trickle down through to the rest of us." His notion, in contrast, was that "if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure in their prosperity, it will rise upward, just as yeast rises upward."
And it isn't just the Rs. By the '80s, the D elite had disowned anything even vaguely New Deal. Nor did they object much to the Reagan era deregulation. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall, the much needed banking regs passed in 1933, was an "achievement" of the Clinton admin. Nor did the Ds do anything to the Wall St. manipulators who caused the '08 crash. Except help bail them out, creating a wonderful incentive to do more of the same.
The current game is corporate stock buy-backs, which enrich CEOs by driving up the price artificially and diverting profits that could have been used to expand, thus creating more jobs. Instead, the outcome is mass lay-offs to finance the buying spree. Where is the D party outrage over this?! Well, look at their campaign donations; see how much is from corporations. We're in the econ re-runs of Gilded Age 2.0, Roaring 2020s.
I also think it has to do with the Republican platform. It has always been for big business and it always will be. The working public is just there as their labor force.
To put it in simple terms. The trickle down theory means the working man gets pissed on. Corporations can afford to pay a living wage with benefits. But are greedy and want everything for themselves. Companies go bankrupt, while executives and stockholders rake in the cash. Leaving the workers with no compensation.
See my reply to Mary W.--the term came from FDR. Also adds to your last two points with examples like how the current manipulations of stock buy-backs affects us workers.
To think that people still believe in that supply-side economics bullshit — I don’t know how we can get most of the people to understand it is all smoke and mirrors and to keep voting for Republicans will not help you or your pocketbook.
Republicans are only interested in giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.
It's not complicated but for the delusional, it may as well be rocket science. Sorry for the old catch-phrase… 😢
William Greider did an interview for The Atlantic Dec. '81 with David Stockman, budget director for the Reagan admin. Stockman, conservative critic of Dem. budgets, expressed some doubts about supply side ideas, saying that "no one really understands what's going on with all these numbers." Meaning equations used to justify the theory. This became a book, //The Education of David Stockman,// which came out in '82, re-issued 2012. Any of Greider's books on the complex manipulations of financial insiders, their powerful influence on both Rs and Dems, and the resulting devastation of democracy are totally worth reading. Especially as he was sounding the alarm in the '90s; the situation has only gotten worse.
The real "magic" is that it has worked for so long. Capitalism has never been about the greater good, now has it? So why do so many believe the ugly proganda about "reckless spending", "marxism" or "communism"? Because they have been brainwashed for a long time, and gotten out of the habit of thinking for themselves. So who needs facts, if they can throw the -isms around (without understanding their meaning) and sound smart and, oh yeah, patriotic? Simple facts: it was a Republican administration that led us into the Great Depression; it was a Democratic president who helped us overcome it and rebuild. The pattern continues. Time to wake up, America. And yes, Mary, we are a great country!
A problem is that there are Democrats and "Democrats." The former the New Dealers; the latter, who now dominate the party, thrive on corporate donations and are big fans of deregulation (see my reply to Mary W.) and "capitalism." Also there is a description of the current manipulative game of corporate stock buy-backs. My argument as to why capitalism is not the same as private business is in my reply to joe s. FDR called out all of this stuff explicitly--and the econ fundies hated him for it; they still do. From today's "Dems"? [*crickets*] I guess we'll have to wait until the Great Depression of 2029.
It has seemed to me for some time that being a staunch republican requires unquestioning faith. Trickle-down economics has failed for more than forty years but the party stands firm. Is it really any wonder that they are prepared to worship Trump?
I am , in theory at least, a free-market fan. But it isn't free-market when the oligarchs write the laws to suit themselves. it's gangster capitalism, not much different from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or Putin's Russia. don't know how we can get rid of them; the Dim-ocrats like corporate money as much as the Rethuglicans do. At the risk of sounding like GW or Dishonest Don, I'd like to be dictator for a while. Just long enough to liquidate the corpo-rats, klepto-crats, crazy and/or corrupt politicians of BOTH parties, Satan's servant "evangelists", Limbaugh and Ranttity type poison-mongers, sensation- spewing/fact-ignoring mass media bosses, and the entire tax code.
"Free" market, "free" enterprise were p.r. (read: propaganda) terms invented in the '30s U.S. by a corporate interest group (N.A.M.) to get us to conflate democracy with capitalism. The common term prior to that was "private enterprise." In biz school 101, the basic costs of doing business are explained as land, labor, and capital. So then how can business be the same as capitalism? Free enterprise is the privately owned (including co-ops) production of physically real goods and services. Capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money, the financial side, which by itself produces nothing. Why isn't this ever pointed out?! Worst of all, the financialized econ system has now devolved into doing nothing but strip everything out of the Real Economy, the products of businesses and labor. There's a good reason the old left wingers called these econopaths "capitalist pigs." They always want more.
another thing the "capitalist pigs' never mention is their taste for keeping their profits, while offloading their costs onto the general public. Dump steel-pickling acid in the river? Everyone down stream has to either drink polluted water, or buy an expensive water treatment plant. Dump toxic chemicals like ethylene oxide in the air? Everyone else's health suffers. Run the kind of Ponzi schemes that crashed the economy in 1929 and 2008? Ten-Millions of people lose their jobs, savings, homes. The Rethuglicans are 100% in favor of this kind of piracy and Dim-ocrats don't stop it when they can. Like that smooth-talking corporate shill Obama. After 2008, he spent trillion of tax dollars BAILING OUT THE BANK GANGSTERS, and left Main Street twisting in the wind. I think it was Molly Ivans who said"One republican Party is bad enough. we really don't need two."
One problem, JaBier, is that most people stand in awe of great wealth. Wealthy people are attributed godlike qualities and so, they command deference. In their ranks are plenty of egotists ,
sociopaths (having no conscience aids money-making) and people of middling intelligence. Seen as vastly superior by society lets them -literally- get away with murder!
When I moved into the WV mountains the local question was ' If you're so smart then why ain't you rich?'. Rich in dollars is implied but coming from the NY, NJ , Conn.Greater Metropolitan Area, clean water and fresh air in the mountains were the true value and wealth
In the 1960's the credit industry allowed people to spend future earnings to buy and maintain a motor vehicle or a house and a person was valued by not how much one had but how much capital and property one controlled. If you owned a house appraised for $50,000.00 and your debt was $50,000.00 then your value is $100,000.00 instead of 0. When a corporation goes bankrupt, it's been zeroed out and debts are forgiven, no one is personally held responsible to the creditors and the assets are sold for a huge loss. That's how the World Trade Center was financed and it was constructed at an astronomical financial loss.
Let's make sure that President Biden, if re-elected, does not renew the previously devious and crippling "Trump Tax Cuts" of 2017. They expire next year. Trump has already said that he would renew them. Stop the crooks! All policy comes out of real-life experience and we have had enough, thank you!
Income taxes were created to support the military. I have striven throughout my adult years to keep my traceable income below the poverty level. Bank of America has a special deal for military families, just call their customer service
It was 2 weeks after you wrote about san Antonio and a dozen other cities denying Amazon because they want good roads and schools for their employees but they don't want to pay for them that an Amazon warehouse was announced in the lowest paid county in Florida Volusia. It's boggling that patriots will jump to fight in the dumbest fought wars on earth but asking the company's who are profiting from the war to help pay is un-American
Well Woody sang it. It went something like this. “ I saw a sign, no trespassing, the other side said nothing, this side is made for you and me.” Ownership of land of land is theft. Nature cannot be bought. Those who own the land make the rules. People are brainwashed into thinking that getting a thirty year mortgage is a good thing. They have you by the balls. There is no American dream, only a nightmare.
Saving money and not enjoying the day is not where it’s at.
Don’t live for tomorrow, spend and live for today. Tomorrow may never come.
I don’t mean keeping up with the Jones. But have that backyard barbecue, play some music, dance with friends . Invite everyone, make new friends. Take a walk on a trail in the woods or park, talk to everyone you meet. Go to the movies, listen to a local band. Start your own social group. Get active, enjoy the world. Take that trip you always dreamed of.
We take the status quo as reality, use your imagination. All the pundits say the same thing year after, and expect a different result. That is the definition of insanity. Go with the gut, no one is going to save you. Change comes from inside, be true to yourself. Be all you can be, but not in the army. Might does not make wright. Communicate with compassion, that is the key.
Oh, Lord, don't get me started. Add to that Big Pharma and Big Ag using government research to better their products and increase their profits, and we lose again. And again. And again.
Please add to that Big Oil, which gets obscene amounts of taxpayer subsidies for the privilege of destroying the globe.
Thanks to President Reagan and David Stockman, "trickle down" has become the mantra of Republicans tax policy. As long as their corporate backers keep getting tax breaks, Republicans will consistently vote to reduce taxes for them, while punishing low-income people by reducing their SNAP benefits and piling on work requirements. Are we a great country or what?
The irony being that the term "trickle down" was used first by FDR during an Oct. 1932 campaign speech in Detroit. He rejected the market fundamentalists of that era who, he said, claimed that "if we make the rich richer, somehow that will trickle down through to the rest of us." His notion, in contrast, was that "if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure in their prosperity, it will rise upward, just as yeast rises upward."
And it isn't just the Rs. By the '80s, the D elite had disowned anything even vaguely New Deal. Nor did they object much to the Reagan era deregulation. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall, the much needed banking regs passed in 1933, was an "achievement" of the Clinton admin. Nor did the Ds do anything to the Wall St. manipulators who caused the '08 crash. Except help bail them out, creating a wonderful incentive to do more of the same.
The current game is corporate stock buy-backs, which enrich CEOs by driving up the price artificially and diverting profits that could have been used to expand, thus creating more jobs. Instead, the outcome is mass lay-offs to finance the buying spree. Where is the D party outrage over this?! Well, look at their campaign donations; see how much is from corporations. We're in the econ re-runs of Gilded Age 2.0, Roaring 2020s.
I also think it has to do with the Republican platform. It has always been for big business and it always will be. The working public is just there as their labor force.
To put it in simple terms. The trickle down theory means the working man gets pissed on. Corporations can afford to pay a living wage with benefits. But are greedy and want everything for themselves. Companies go bankrupt, while executives and stockholders rake in the cash. Leaving the workers with no compensation.
And Hightower has wrote about c.e.o. pay going from 30 times a worker salary in the 70s to 300 times now
See my reply to Mary W.--the term came from FDR. Also adds to your last two points with examples like how the current manipulations of stock buy-backs affects us workers.
This is such old-hat garbage.
To think that people still believe in that supply-side economics bullshit — I don’t know how we can get most of the people to understand it is all smoke and mirrors and to keep voting for Republicans will not help you or your pocketbook.
Republicans are only interested in giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.
It's not complicated but for the delusional, it may as well be rocket science. Sorry for the old catch-phrase… 😢
Very well put.
William Greider did an interview for The Atlantic Dec. '81 with David Stockman, budget director for the Reagan admin. Stockman, conservative critic of Dem. budgets, expressed some doubts about supply side ideas, saying that "no one really understands what's going on with all these numbers." Meaning equations used to justify the theory. This became a book, //The Education of David Stockman,// which came out in '82, re-issued 2012. Any of Greider's books on the complex manipulations of financial insiders, their powerful influence on both Rs and Dems, and the resulting devastation of democracy are totally worth reading. Especially as he was sounding the alarm in the '90s; the situation has only gotten worse.
... “magic of the marketplace.” But remember: Magicians don’t perform magic – they perform illusions.
What a great line!
Yeah, it is! My fave is by the ecofiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson: "The problem with 'the invisible hand' is it never picks up the check."
The real "magic" is that it has worked for so long. Capitalism has never been about the greater good, now has it? So why do so many believe the ugly proganda about "reckless spending", "marxism" or "communism"? Because they have been brainwashed for a long time, and gotten out of the habit of thinking for themselves. So who needs facts, if they can throw the -isms around (without understanding their meaning) and sound smart and, oh yeah, patriotic? Simple facts: it was a Republican administration that led us into the Great Depression; it was a Democratic president who helped us overcome it and rebuild. The pattern continues. Time to wake up, America. And yes, Mary, we are a great country!
A problem is that there are Democrats and "Democrats." The former the New Dealers; the latter, who now dominate the party, thrive on corporate donations and are big fans of deregulation (see my reply to Mary W.) and "capitalism." Also there is a description of the current manipulative game of corporate stock buy-backs. My argument as to why capitalism is not the same as private business is in my reply to joe s. FDR called out all of this stuff explicitly--and the econ fundies hated him for it; they still do. From today's "Dems"? [*crickets*] I guess we'll have to wait until the Great Depression of 2029.
It has seemed to me for some time that being a staunch republican requires unquestioning faith. Trickle-down economics has failed for more than forty years but the party stands firm. Is it really any wonder that they are prepared to worship Trump?
I am , in theory at least, a free-market fan. But it isn't free-market when the oligarchs write the laws to suit themselves. it's gangster capitalism, not much different from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or Putin's Russia. don't know how we can get rid of them; the Dim-ocrats like corporate money as much as the Rethuglicans do. At the risk of sounding like GW or Dishonest Don, I'd like to be dictator for a while. Just long enough to liquidate the corpo-rats, klepto-crats, crazy and/or corrupt politicians of BOTH parties, Satan's servant "evangelists", Limbaugh and Ranttity type poison-mongers, sensation- spewing/fact-ignoring mass media bosses, and the entire tax code.
"Free" market, "free" enterprise were p.r. (read: propaganda) terms invented in the '30s U.S. by a corporate interest group (N.A.M.) to get us to conflate democracy with capitalism. The common term prior to that was "private enterprise." In biz school 101, the basic costs of doing business are explained as land, labor, and capital. So then how can business be the same as capitalism? Free enterprise is the privately owned (including co-ops) production of physically real goods and services. Capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money, the financial side, which by itself produces nothing. Why isn't this ever pointed out?! Worst of all, the financialized econ system has now devolved into doing nothing but strip everything out of the Real Economy, the products of businesses and labor. There's a good reason the old left wingers called these econopaths "capitalist pigs." They always want more.
another thing the "capitalist pigs' never mention is their taste for keeping their profits, while offloading their costs onto the general public. Dump steel-pickling acid in the river? Everyone down stream has to either drink polluted water, or buy an expensive water treatment plant. Dump toxic chemicals like ethylene oxide in the air? Everyone else's health suffers. Run the kind of Ponzi schemes that crashed the economy in 1929 and 2008? Ten-Millions of people lose their jobs, savings, homes. The Rethuglicans are 100% in favor of this kind of piracy and Dim-ocrats don't stop it when they can. Like that smooth-talking corporate shill Obama. After 2008, he spent trillion of tax dollars BAILING OUT THE BANK GANGSTERS, and left Main Street twisting in the wind. I think it was Molly Ivans who said"One republican Party is bad enough. we really don't need two."
One problem, JaBier, is that most people stand in awe of great wealth. Wealthy people are attributed godlike qualities and so, they command deference. In their ranks are plenty of egotists ,
sociopaths (having no conscience aids money-making) and people of middling intelligence. Seen as vastly superior by society lets them -literally- get away with murder!
When I moved into the WV mountains the local question was ' If you're so smart then why ain't you rich?'. Rich in dollars is implied but coming from the NY, NJ , Conn.Greater Metropolitan Area, clean water and fresh air in the mountains were the true value and wealth
Right on!
In the 1960's the credit industry allowed people to spend future earnings to buy and maintain a motor vehicle or a house and a person was valued by not how much one had but how much capital and property one controlled. If you owned a house appraised for $50,000.00 and your debt was $50,000.00 then your value is $100,000.00 instead of 0. When a corporation goes bankrupt, it's been zeroed out and debts are forgiven, no one is personally held responsible to the creditors and the assets are sold for a huge loss. That's how the World Trade Center was financed and it was constructed at an astronomical financial loss.
Let's make sure that President Biden, if re-elected, does not renew the previously devious and crippling "Trump Tax Cuts" of 2017. They expire next year. Trump has already said that he would renew them. Stop the crooks! All policy comes out of real-life experience and we have had enough, thank you!
Income taxes were created to support the military. I have striven throughout my adult years to keep my traceable income below the poverty level. Bank of America has a special deal for military families, just call their customer service
It was 2 weeks after you wrote about san Antonio and a dozen other cities denying Amazon because they want good roads and schools for their employees but they don't want to pay for them that an Amazon warehouse was announced in the lowest paid county in Florida Volusia. It's boggling that patriots will jump to fight in the dumbest fought wars on earth but asking the company's who are profiting from the war to help pay is un-American
The corruption caused by corporate lobbying(bribery-contributing to their candidates campaign)
A well-known folk song has these lyrics, in part:
"Oh, the candidate's a dodger, yes, a well-known dodger,
Oh, the candidate's a dodger, yes, and I'm a dodger too."
I did some searching. With uncounted verses, I see none describing Capitalists. Anyone care to write one?
Robert
Well Woody sang it. It went something like this. “ I saw a sign, no trespassing, the other side said nothing, this side is made for you and me.” Ownership of land of land is theft. Nature cannot be bought. Those who own the land make the rules. People are brainwashed into thinking that getting a thirty year mortgage is a good thing. They have you by the balls. There is no American dream, only a nightmare.
Saving money and not enjoying the day is not where it’s at.
Don’t live for tomorrow, spend and live for today. Tomorrow may never come.
I don’t mean keeping up with the Jones. But have that backyard barbecue, play some music, dance with friends . Invite everyone, make new friends. Take a walk on a trail in the woods or park, talk to everyone you meet. Go to the movies, listen to a local band. Start your own social group. Get active, enjoy the world. Take that trip you always dreamed of.
We take the status quo as reality, use your imagination. All the pundits say the same thing year after, and expect a different result. That is the definition of insanity. Go with the gut, no one is going to save you. Change comes from inside, be true to yourself. Be all you can be, but not in the army. Might does not make wright. Communicate with compassion, that is the key.