I wasn’t an especially savvy kid in the 80’s, but I remember thinking how laughable this was, even when it was proposed back then.
So like…yeah. No shit it didn’t.
Just came to upvote/ make this comment.
Its important to note the failures of economic conservatism, or whatever bullshit you want to call it.
The Republicans are eventually going to have to pivot off of Trump and MAGA. This is what they’ll return to. We need to make it culturally unpalatable to do so.
I agree with you. So many times in the last decades democratic presidents have started their period with the economy in a downswing after the last republican president. They get the economy in order just in time for the next republican president to step in, take the credit and mess things up again.
Trickle down is layman for Neo-liberalism, the economic theory put forth by Milton Friedman, and to some degree, Ayn Rand. Neoliberalism is at the core of her Objectivism, which is the core of her books cuz lord fucking knows she has the narrative and character development skills of a 10yr old homeschooled child who’s only met the people at his church.
Neoliberalism is what’s inferred when anyone mentions the Chicago school of Economics. It’s what Reagan and Thatcher were all about, which set us down this path of “individualism”, aka austerity (which pans out as privatizing profits and socializing losses). The loss of third places, institutionalized alienation (makes for a better consumer, doncha know?) thru economic migration (no family, no safety net), dismantling of public services and social institutions, pulling the ladder up behind them and cursing their children while stealing their futures for a cushier retirement (don’t forgive; don’t forget. Just like vacations and self actualization, retirement is something we won’t get). Amd lest we forget to mention their Argentinian NeoLiberal kill-everyone-who-disagrees-with-you Numero Uno, Pinochet. He’s like the NeoLiberal version of Che, except without any morality or purpose, other than seizing power. The same mirror shows the difference in their politics (because economics, no matter how much they’ve tried to sterilize it into a unique science, can NOT be divorced from politics. If nothing else, Marx at least has THAT right).
Both parties are neoliberal. Dems and Reps. The last New Deal president was Carter. Society doesn’t have “problems”, everything is actually working exactly as intended. The smartest people we produce as a country, err, as a species, go on to work for the 1%, do you really think this shit isn’t thought thru? That’s the effectiveness of their media right there. We can reverse engineer and extract DNA of everyone who breathed in this room for the past week (re:facts), I’m pretty sure, naw, fuck it, I’d bet my balls, the effectiveness and nuance of propaganda in media is equally sophisticated. A great social slight of hand, mind control trick.
I see you’re nodding along, right, you know what I’m sayin, every news cycle. Every headline, devolved from what’s to us, the obvious reality. We see it play out on half of us every other day. It’s like watching cartoon villainy, right? Who’s writing these scripts? Ffs.
And they see it play out on us every other other day.
And to them its the exact same thing, 180°.
The “ineffectiveness” of Democrats, hahahahaha, fuckin, pleeeease. Their playbook is the same Everytime. Make a modest reach towards change (which people want) pre-self-negotiate to torpedo any chance and either change nothing or pass the Republican version of the bill (ie Obamacare). And we steadily march, ever right.
Democrats will never bring change. They’re the token pressure relief valve, to slow the train just a little bit, but never effect it’s route. They’re there to take the wave of hate from the people who want an end to neoliberalism, but don’t necessarily know what part of the gamesmanship to direct their anger. You’ve seen this before, I’ll elucidate; just like the people don’t pay Ticketmaster (I mean we do, with 18 different junk fees) the big bucks, the same 150 ppl who own everything, do, so the ‘service’ Ticketmaster is really providing ain’t tickets, it’s deflection. Which is why their monopoly is allowed to exist, because it entrenches wealth even further.
Democrats = Ticketmaster.
So yea. We need to make sure MAGA can’t pivot back to the lie of meritocracy, but we need to bring the pitchforks and the torches out to remind the Democrats that they’ll burn too.
Alright that’s enough. I’m out. You have two ears and one mouth, listen twice as much as you speak. Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Give more than you take. Kindness is free. ACAB. Eat the rich. Drink your water.
If-we-all-agree-to-stop-having-children-society-will-have-no-choice-but-give-in-to-our-demands
I’ll summarize for those that don’t want to read:
“I’m as dumb as a spatula, but I have opinions!”
“We’ve had record profits this quarter, we should pay our employees more!”
… Said no CEO ever.
During Covid my old job said they would be pausing all raises and cutting some costs to weather the storm. A couple months later they called a company wide meeting to announce record profits and that they would be providing a 20% raise . . . to the executives only. Then they got genuinely pissed when none one applauded them.
At our quarterly meeting, our company president always lets us know how much money the company is making, reminding us all of exactly how little we’re being paid in comparison. And I think he believes it’s morale-boosting.
We’ve done surveys, and people don’t really like to get more money for their work. They much prefer the sense of pride and accomplishment when our company makes record profits!
The stupidity of that really baffles me. How can you be so low on empathy and understanding that you don’t get that this would be the reaction?
I mean, I understand, even if I don’t like, the drive some people have to greedily gobble up every dime they can get their grubby hands on. But I can’t understand how they could have thought that the people adversely affected by it would applaud it. It’s not like I expect cows to give me a high five when I eat a burger…
That’s literally what a bonus is. My girlfriend has a bonus every year. That is, except for the year when her bank had to pay fees for a violation, they didn’t pay a bonus then since bonuses are coming out of the profits
Trickle down? It was called VOODOO fucking economics in its day. Plenty of analysts and other people with half a brain understood what a travesty it was and is. BUT too many people at the bottom of the food chain keep getting convinced that it works. :/
…too many people at the bottom of the food chain keep getting convinced that it works.
Conservatives would be insulted if they could read.
another name is horse and sparrow.
in other words they expect us to eat their shit.
I remember Gene Simmons from KISS being very vocal in interviews about the wonders of trickle down economics. I think that was the first time I heard about it, so I read up on it and realized the guy had no idea what he was talking about.
George HW Bush called it that in 1980. It was known as horse and sparrow originally as the horse ate the grain and the birds picked at its shit.
Wow, that old name actually makes a lot of sense. I wonder which marketing person helped Reagan with the new dumb ass name. It obviously worked but I don’t get it. 1) trickling sounds gross 2) lol why would I ever EVER believe that if I let rich people keep all their money via incredibly unfair tax breaks, someday I’ll magically get some of that money? It would sound dubious even if it came from someone I already personally knew and had trusted for decades 3) even if I believed it, why would I want the extra step of continually paying a higher tax rate than companies, hoping one day the theory pays off.
This sure was a doozy of a lie. How they ever convinced anyone of it is… very strange.
Because in 1983, the last and only time this worked, we cut taxes and as a result we took in more tax revenue as avoidance/evasion was more expensive. This is why some think the Laffer Curve has more validity than it should be ceded
And in one of the great ironies of US history, it was George Bush Sr. who first called it “voodoo economics”.
St. Ronnie did a crazy amount of damage to our country.
I would argue he’s our worst president ever. Andrew Jackson, etc. etc. Absolutely shitty, but those guys were flying blind without history to learn from, and their atrocities were sadly socially acceptable at the time. Reagan destroyed everything right this country had done, and enabled the future monsters to come. He brought religion to the front of American politics, destroyed the regulations that protected us, brought unfathomable debt, the war on drugs, the list goes on.
The Orange Shit Stain is probably a worse person, but he arrived on Reagan’s back.
Makes Trump seem almost OK in comparison… Almost. It’s crazy to me that I can make the argument that he’s only the third worst Republican president of my lifetime.
I want to argue that W’s damage was more immediate, but I keep finding arguments against that.
W might the the president most to blame for climate change. When Dems win it tends to be with a 50% + 1 majority, or close enough to it, while including senators from places like West fucking Virginia.
Republicans at any time can do bipartisan things about climate. Dems don’t have that power.
I’d say any time between 1990 and 2010 was the time where there should have absolutely been enough consensus, and close enough to last minute to actually do something. Shut down all the coal plants in the West. Embargo countries that don’t cooperate on climate. That could have been done. (And yeah, we could have absolutely shut down every coal plant in the West if we were willing.)
Then I was going to add another caveat about reading the 9/11 report. I don’t fully blame W for that. It’s a thing that would have been possible for any president to miss. But he’s the one who missed it. I don’t fully absolve him of it, either.
W’s intentions behind the Iraq war may have been for the good of us all, but the results absolutely weren’t.
The war in Afghanistan can be shared mostly between Obama and Trump. We were there for 20 years and couldn’t manage to make a safe haven. Could have built fucking walls around Kabul, built up the government only there, and let them work on expanding that control outward for the next 50 years.
I still believe Trump’s damage will be longer term. I don’t know if he’ll be able to outdo W, and he’ll never reach Reagan levels of damage. But I don’t think we’ve seen most of Trump’s damage yet.
Trumps damage was mostly to the institutions. The GOP has spent decades slowly inching up to fascism and staging elaborate multilayered plans to steal power and undermine human rights. Then along comes Trump and just brazenly does all the shit the GOP had been tipoeing around and trying to be sneaky with and everyone just kind of stared in shock… and then nothing happened. There was a lot of hand wringing and shaking of fingers and Democrats at least tried a little bit to push back but Trump exposed the fact that if both parties aren’t behind it there’s nothing that can really be done to stop someone just straight up seizing power.
Now the GOP has realized they didn’t need to tiptoe around all their fascist dreams all these years, and with them finally locking down the supreme court there’s literally nothing outside the military or national guard stepping in that can stop them. We’re really just banking on not all the GOP being willing to go 100% traitor at this point because if they do we’re fucked.
Let’s capture another 50 yrs worth to data, just to be sure.
Yeah, we can’t stop now, it’s just about to kick in!
I can almost hear it starting to trickle… No, of course I can’t.
Taking from the poor to give to the rich has only given us the guillotine.
No billionaire has ever helped me or benefited society.
They don’t even help when they die. Their wealth is mostly just distributed to their families.
That’s just false.
How do they help? By hoarding wealth? By creating “charitable” foundations as tax shelters where they get to control how money is distributed based on their arbitrary rules?
I’ll use Microsoft as an example of a company that basically changed the entire world run by one of the most famous billionaires we’ve ever known for the majority of its life I believe.
Did any of us really need an “economics study” to reach this conclusion? Now how do we fix it? Eat the rich?
I honestly believe it’ll take physical violence to get back what’s been taken.
I wish it didn’t but historically and logically speaking, there’s no other way. The unethical stone cold people rise to the top, and the few who are powerful yet maintain their morals are not nearly powerful enough to fight the rest. Critical change has always come about with revolutions, either violent or technological. And I don’t think technology can improve anything for us at this point, if anything it will make things harder.
Yea, I sure as hell would rather find balance at the hands of peace but has that ever happened? Has a collective known to hoard resources ever in history amicably decided to give back what they took? Nothing I’ve ever read* indicates yes. Once your rent goes up it’s never going back down. Humans are, imho, innately evil - as in the tendency to cause harm to others for personal gain and fulfillment is a basic human/animal* drive. The hoarding population ain’t giving shit back. We’re gonna have to take it back. Shoulda never been so fucking gullible to begin with.
The sad part is that it wasn’t always like this. Hunter gatherer communities cared for their pack (with a few exceptions, like sick and disabled members that can’t keep up) because if the pack survives then they will survive as well. But with the advent of agriculture, individualism popped up more and more, the good of all no longer meant as much.
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Technology is a tool of the wealthy. Tesla has shown us that.
Yes comrade, it will
That’s the cool part–power and money manipulates the game itself through regulatory capture, tending to resist attempts to fix it.
That’s a really unhealthy diet. Don’t do that! But honestly: As long as you have a smart elite, you can change things for the better by getting enough people to protest loudly and a few to protest violently. If your elite has degenerated to much over the generations your only option is revolution, which is usually bloody and not fun.
Fifty years ago, they already knew this
We were not primitive and stupid 50 years ago. These assholes knew they were contributing to global warming as much as they knew trickle down economics wasn’t going to work.
We also knew it 3 years ago, when the study came out. What a weird article to link.
This is not news. But wealthy people basically create laws by lobbying and they sure don’t like laws and regulations that take their money.
Why is a three year old article being posted in the news community? This is not news. This is just rage bait.
An infuriating part of it is that IMF, money lovers that they are, published research on this at least ten years ago.
But you can teach someone something that their job depends on them not knowing.
Trickle down economics was never something an intelligent lifeform needed disproving. It’s so transparently false that it’s practically synonymous with “you’re a moron rube and I plan to profit from that fact”
Fun fact: “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics used to be called “horse and sparrow” theory, because the poors got to eat the leftovers from the horseshit.
I think it’s a more appropriate name, even though it sounds cuter.
George HW Bush called it “voodoo economics” in the grand tradition of GOP presidential candidates being completely against something during the primaries and then completely for it during the general.
It was always “trickle up” marketed as the opposite.
I’ve heard it said that “trickle down is an euphemism for funnel up”.
they didn’t get rich by allowing money to slip out of their fingers… you have to take it from them…
“Well you der money is like water if you let us grasp it tighter the more will flow out of our hands”
For anyone who thinks that is surprising: I have a bridge to sell you.
And if that’s not what they’re looking for, I have a lovely mountain chalet in Florida or some oceanfront property in Wyoming right by a major metropolitan area
So we stop doing that, right? Right?
