Trickle Down Economics

It’s Actually Three Big Lies

Lie #1: Tax Cuts for the Rich Benefit the Whole Society.

This is the most widely known falsehood of Trickle Down Economics, claiming that if you cut taxes for the rich and corporations, their windfall will rain down on the people below them and that tax-cuts will pay for themselves through growth in the economy.

What Really Happens

Manufacturing industries save money by gutting of environmental and worker safety regulations. The results harm middle income, and most drastically affect lower income workers and communities and people of color. The finance industry employs high-risk tactics for short-term profits and vulture-like high-interest loans to the poor. The primary motive for deregulation is for quick and greedy and growth, which then in turn, collapses because it is fundamentally unstable.

Lie #2: Deregulation will Create More Jobs

This claim is that cutting or even removing environmental, worker and consumer-safety regulations on manufacturing, extraction (oil, gas, coal, minerals) and the finance industry will free-up business and industry from the oppressive bonds that stifle economic growth, resulting in greater wealth for all.

https://www.thebalance.com/deregulation-definition-pros-cons-examples-3305921

Lie #3:Wage Suppression

Widely believed, this lie holds that raising wages, particularly the minimum wage, kills jobs.

What Really happens

When wages are suppressed, people need second or third jobs to make ends meet and/or will require social assistance. When low to middle-class income raises, it is immediately recirculated back in the local economy generating tax revenue, which in turn supports a stronger community. The downside? CEOs make less money (of which they neither reinvest back into the local community nor pay taxes).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/13/american-economy-wage-suppression-how-it-works

Symptoms, Not Problems

Let us go down the list: Homelessness, hunger, crime, under-funded schools, deteriorating infrastructure, compromised health care system, environmental degradation, massive inequality, and extreme political polarization. These are all symptoms of a bigger problem caused by the lie known as trickledown economics. Until we start to reverse this reality, we can only triage these symptoms.

Learn more about our Correlated Gauges here.

Yes, this is Over-Simplified – BUT

Macro/micro, Keynesian vs neo-liberal economics are much more complicated than a few paragraphs, but because most of us have little to no knowledge regarding economic policies, we can fall for bullshit packaged in bumper sticker slogans, backed-up by economic studies written by old white men who are bank-rolled by wealthy old white men who only want to maintain the status-quo that has made them so excessively rich. 40-plus years of the big lie know as Trickle Down economics has gutted our once thriving middle class and has driven income-inequality to levels so unbearable, our democracy is mortal danger.

Get Curious!