EDIT: Seems like the article is suggesting that giving more disposable income to the rich, results in them using that extra income to buy capital rent seeking assets. So it is a double fuck you to the poor. Because not only do the rich end up paying proportionally less in taxes, but they also use the extra money to compete with you for your home, buy the home and rent it back to you, putting you in an even worse financial situation.
The policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible, but it seems people would much rather pick on the strawman.
Unlike many of our worst ideas, I'm actually surprised this one didn't become more popular around the world.
I suspect that were I to learn about the industrial revolution I would find that the US Robber Barons didn't invent their talking points either and that they simply took British Industrialist talking points and, err, gave them 3 minutes on the stove.
In UK though the salaries are fixed at 25k GBP annually until forever, they simply like this number.
I mean I'm perfectly fine with people who work hard making a lot of money. But that changes once that money is used against me. From that moment on I want to be compensated for damages, and the best way to do it is through taxes.
I don't want to be personally compensated. I just want to live in a society where people's basic needs are easily met: clothes, food, medicine, housing. The current landscape is, by the day, increasingly dystopian.
PS And you wonder why Mississippi is richer than the UK.
PPS The Laffer curve is real, has a mountain of evidence and disproves this paper.
And in the late 70s, they launched Operation Berkshire as a bulwark against negative press and government regulation.
They have literally been found guilty of conspiring to suppress the health risks.
every single time its resulted in lower tax intake compensated with more deficit spending.
Also just because someone benefits, that doesn't mean that other people have to suffer.
If basic needs aren’t being sufficiently eased, there’s no money left to invest.
The only reason this isn't common sense is because the rich have fought it for millennia.
France is concerned that the IMF main jump in and take things under control because the government's public deficit is out of control. With a GDP of about $3.6 trillion (american trillion, not french) and public spending representing, officially, 57.2% of those $3.6 trillion, that's a cool $2 trillion spent, yearly, by the state. This is where wealth goes to die.
If you were to seize, just fully seize (and consider it's liquid, which it is not), the wealth of all the billionaires in France (there aren't even 50 of them) you'd end up with $500 billion.
So if you were to just take all the wealth from all the french billionaires, you'd only pay a quarter (!) of the budget of the french state. For one year.
And that's it. 25% for a year.
Another way to see it: the french public deficit is more than $100 billion, yearly. If you were to seize the wealth of all french billionaires, you'd only have enough money to prevent the public debt from growing (which has to be at around 140% by now) for five years.
I'm not listening to talks about "taxing the rich" anymore until that caste called politicians stops spending money it doesn't have, enslaving future generations that shall be taxed to death to pay the insane public debt their governments are creating.
Wanna talk about what's happening to the city of Brussels (Belgium), my native city? 40% right at the poverty line. Immense deficit. Conditions of living going down the drain. First political party in the poll is now the PTB, a full on communist party (and communist in the EU have noticed that, at the moment, they could get the votes of islamists, so strangely enough in a "the enemy of my enemy of my friend" way, communists in countries like France and Belgium happen to be very welcoming to religious extremism [in France the communist party literally has been forced, when it created a coalition with others party at the left, to sign a paper saying it condemned islamism terrorism for they've been so cosy with the idea that it really wasn't clear at all that they actually were against islamist terrorism]).
And you want to get me started on that wonderful discovery the left made recently: that by importing millions of poor migrants and then giving them the right to vote, by a very surprising coincidence these poor imported migrants happened to not vote for the right?
How... Convenient?
Several countries are discovering that: "you eventually end up of the money of others" and "when the rich becomes poor, the poor dies".
The one thing that really irks me in this is the full-on hypocrites I know who believe that anyone richer than them should be taxed to death: to them "trickle down economics" do not work but that they live a middle-class lifestyle more preposterous than 99% of the planet doesn't bother them. They want lower taxes but not for those richer than they are.
I cannot understand that mindset.
I hate the Zuck: really, screw that guy and his faked 3D legless avatar demo for his dystopian VR world (how did that one turn out btw? As well as the Meta AI race?) and screw his PHP+JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ad world. Just fuck it. But I don't give a single crap in the world that he's got two $250 million Yacht or whatever they cost and however many he's got.
Good. For. Him.
I'd rather be poor and free than live under communism. And doubly so if we're talking about living in a society dictated both by religious intolerance and communism (which is where several countries are headed).
And if you want to "help the poor", go give all your money, open your house/appartment to pooor migrants and give me a fucking break.
There's an observation.
I think it’s been decades by now.
The hikes on labor come later, when the war debt needs to be paid.
When half the country has believed something for close to a half a century, across multiple generations, you bet your ass it needs to be debunked. The fallacy of the "precious job creators" is as American as "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"
The fact that you and I were not dumb enough to fall for it doesn't really help anyone in the grand scheme of things. There's still an insane amount of work left in educating the public, and we may even be regressing at this point.
I found at least found one analysis (by a left leaning think tank, so take it for what you will) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-failure-of-supp... that seems to show that supply-side economics hasn't panned out.
It seems obvious that there is an optimal tax rate, too much or too little is bad. But I'd definitely say right now we are far far on the too little side of things.
"the term 'trickle-down economics' was popularized by Democrats in the US to derogate Reaganomics"
"not to be confused with trickle-down economics"
As for whether supply-side economics actually works, to say it "hasn't panned out" I think, is really oversimplifying. Has capitalism (efficient markets but also environmental decay) worked? Has socialism (universal healthcare but also the military) worked? It depends on who your asking and in what regard. In some ways yes and in other ways no. The category is too broad.
Also, just as important as how much we tax is where we tax. Carbon tax (very good) vs stamp duty tax (very bad). Competent policy often allows you to have your cake (supporting government services) and eat it too (not sacrificing growth).
Much of Reagan’s trickle down stuff was based on the idea that we were on the wrong side of the peak.
One is a policy and the other is basically the name of a common criticism for that policy.
For example, the Cartesian circle does not refer to any of the many mathematical advancements Rene Descartes discovered. Instead, it's the name of a common criticism for an argument he made. You can think of it like that.
I can name you differences, but it's like comparing apples and oranges.
If you are not going to tell us anything, why are you teasing us as if you will?
Holding back discussion points is not a way to advance a discussion
So, does the criticism not hold value? Because a large part of "supply-side economics", a term coined in the 70s, is reduction of taxes and regulations. With the idea that that extra capital will then be used to create jobs.
And if that is not what's happening, then I don't care about the semantics of whether or not "trickle-down" is the appropriate term of art to be applied here. The core concept of "giving rich people more money spurs job growth" is apparently false.
Most of the nation (and world) never took any economics. This stuff is all magic or religion or whatever to them. Ronnie Raygun is as good as a saint to much of the US.
I also don’t like targeted new taxes, like taxing sports gambling and recreational drugs, because it unnecessarily entrenches those in our society. Even worse is when they earmark it, like using casino money to fund schools.
Maybe not the name, but the literal idea that the money given to them will flow down. There were even graphics gping with it. Again, in all seriousness.
So yes, it needs to be debunked.
Supply-side economics is based on a flawed premise of looking at only the Laffer curve and saying if taxes are too high the economy suffers, therefore we must make the tax rate arbitrarily low. In reality though there are more nuances to making the tax rate arbitrarily low (e.g. high inflation and cost of living for starters).
Should business that actually do create jobs in practice get bigger tax breaks?
For example, if I by some miracle create a 1 man company that makes $100 million / year profit and somebody else creates a company that makes $100 million / year profit but has 2,000 employees...should the two companies be taxed differently?
Walmart employees 1.6 million people in the US. 68% are full time. Average salaries range from $18.25 / hr (field associate) to $27 / hr (supply chain). Median $30,520 across all US employees. 156,000 employees are estimated to be enrolled in Medicaid (9.4%).
Amazon employees 1.1 million. $23 / hour average for field / fulfillment. Median $53,211 across all US employees. 123,000 employees are estimated to be enrolled in Medicaid (11.7%).
Both offer pretty extensive career development, training and tuition assistance programs.
Profit per employee:
- Walmart $10,800 / employee (1.6 million employees)
- Amazon $50,000 / employee (1.1 million employees)
By comparison:
- AppLovin $3.7 million / employee (898 employees)
- NVIDIA $2.86 million / employee (42,000 employees)
So what if we actually had a tax strategy that literally was aimed at "job creators" rather than "capital gains"? What would that look like?
It’s a good thing farming needs an order of magnitude fewer farmers than a century ago.
Is that actually true? Maybe I'm being dense right now but that's not completely apparent to me.
More abundance per person does seem generally better (albeit there's diminishing marginal utility there), but that's not the same thing as society as a whole producing more with less labor.
It also seems like you could optimize some good things out of existence in this manner, and it's still not clear that robots are going to be able to swoop in and save that kind of newly uneconomical activity, at least within my lifetime.
Supply side economics owners claimed that benefits would "flow" down from the capital owners. The pejorative name "trickle-down economics" accurately reflects that the quantity of benefits that "flows" down to everyone else from those benefiting from massive tax cuts is a mere trickle of the money that the supply side saved from the tax cuts.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3522907-gop-lawmaker-byro...
Well here is one of those federal policy-makers you say doesn't exist, a Republican congressman, advocating four years ago for trickle down economics and advocating for "...letting the free market - and yes, trickle down economics, which does work - actually flourish in the United States"
We literally spend more government money per person on healthcare than France does while having less public healthcare, precisely because of the "help the rich" policies causing most of that public money to go to subsidizing insurance companies.
teach•52m ago