331–340 of 444 posts
Speaking from a historical perspective. The East India company/ies pretty much won much of the world for Britain & Europe. Europe was neither wealthy nor technologically more advanced than India. But the Church with its christianising mission and doctrine of christian discovery allowed the pooling of resources. Concentration of wealth is important and the wealth did trickle down to other countries of Europe. A modern…
What's the problem with the income inequality? Isn't it normal that people who do different things and have different skills to win different amounts of money?
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 8.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
Ahh, the good old trickle-down, aka "piss in my eyes and tell me it's raining" (which is the only way trickle-down actually works). It was pure mythology from the start; there's never been any basis for it to begin with. It's a pity we even have to debunk it like that. Go figure, give a million hungry people $20 each, and see $20M return to the economy the next day as they spend it on food. Give a billionaire $20M, s…
> give a million hungry people $20 each, and see $20M return to the economy the next day as they spend it on food. That’s not a return, the economy doesn’t work that way.
That's the fundamental basis of economy.
Theoretically, if you actually HAD a million starving people, then yes, feeding them from taxation proceeds (or even money creation), is indeed a net benefit to the economy, because they then are able to work, and bring their skills/labor to the market to further stimulate the economy.
In that way, events like starvation, plague, or even sudden economic downturns, can damage the economy beyond the initial scope of their impact by robbing the economy of labor, transport, etc... For this reason, "stimulus" makes sense in these transitionary times.
Of course, the negative effect of stimulus is to temporarily distort businesses by flooding certain resources at below market rates - causing a smaller scale damage to the overall disruption. You have to do the math to determine if it's worth it.
On the other hand if there's no sudden change - no crisis, then stimulus is just permanently distorting markets - which is costly in addition to damaging. If you're feeding literal "starving" people, that's one thing - but if you're sending them checks so that they can increase their discretionary spending - that may look like a good thing because spending is increased, but you're not really creating value as in the original example.
tldr: Feeding actual starving people (or paying for other critical non-discretionary spending) can be smart economic decision if well targeted. Increasing the money supply so that people can spend more on discretionary spending damages the overall economy.
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It is talked about by its opponents. No one on the right uses the phrase except in response. Try and find some examples
Isn't it great how, once the idiocy of trickle-down has become widely known, one can continue pushing the same ideas by merely calling it something else ? Such a neat trick! We are not talking about which phrase the Right uses today. The idea of trickle-down is what our current taxes are based on. There's no need to call it anything; obstructionism suffices
https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publication...
(I am assuming this is a right biased publication, again not well read, genuinely curious because it seems to line up with those middle class I know who were Trump supporters -- they regularly cite their lower taxes).
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I haven't seen a politician advocate for trickle down since the early 1980s. Why is this strawman still the target for low-effort articles?
Not sure about politicians, but it is still widely used by anti-tax republicans. Even if they don't explicitly refer to it as "trickle-down", they use its supposed implications as an argument.
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I’m sure someone would shed a tear for you. Think of how productive thousands of people would be if they weren’t staring down at death or disability daily because some ambitious motherfucker decided to make a cheap commodity like insulin a monopolized product, essential for life at a usurious price.
That is the problem. High regulations that create a quasi-monopoly on products Who make that regulations? The government. The government is just a huge corporation without competition that can use violence legally on people. At each place where the cost of service and product have gone up you will find regulations and monopolistic entreprises who are way too much connected to the government.
There are regulations against price collusion but they are not enforced.
In college, I studied Ronald Coase's famous 1920s papers. The major application ATT was infrastructure stuff. Coase's argument was that "given 0 transaction costs," it doesn't matter who owns what property or right. The market will achieve efficient solutions as firms sell each other radio spectrum or whatnot. Policy should focus on minimizing transaction costs and let the market organize itself. Circa 2005, I heard…
> More wealth, more wealth disparity... almost universally. That is a stark claim with little empirical evidence. If you look at the world, you will find that Europe, one of the most affluent parts of the world has the lowest wealth inequality. While wealth inequality is very high in Africa, one of the poorer regions of the world. Wealth inequality is far more likely to be the outcome of policies. Europe has been dom…
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
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> I haven't ever heard trickle down proponents suggest we give the money to the working class. Because that would require taking from some people and giving to others through government, which is a very inefficient way to do it.
The problem with that argument is it happens all the time. just the other way around. The problem is we're in the worst situation. where people who trust the market don't want to create laws that help the working class and people that want government to create more laws to help the working class argue amongst themselves and the rich and powerful slowly slip in more laws that help them.
I would say even that is a straw man. The argument is that I’d rather trust the market than governments with that task given their respective track records.
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>I mean where do you think defense contractor profits come from? How about medical and Pharma? Inefficiency
Regulatory capture is not inefficiency, it is an extremely efficient result of a system designed to serve capital. At some point we have to stop pretending like we aren’t successfully achieving what our economy is optimized for.
The way to fight it is not by giving more powers to government but giving less.
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> I did not earn any of that? >> A doctor's wage is earned. Your wage is earned. > invested most of my income in that 20 years in to dividend paying stocks Whether that one is 'earned' is debatable. From a neoliberal economists perspective you probably 'earned' it by risking your income. Although I always have to chuckle a bit of someone says that speculation is 'investment'. Investment is buying machinery, investmen…
At its core companies sell stocks to buy machinery and other things to invest in their business. >>You didn't work for it and - since you were able to put it aside for a later use - you didn't actually 'need' it. So from a moral and societal point of view, that money should have rather gone to pay for teachers wages wow. just wow. So morally a person should only be paid what the need to live that is your honest posit…
Do you want me to hold that strawman while you give it a real good bashing? It can be satisfying, strawman bashing. It would however be more productive it you honestly tried to understand the argument I'm making. What do you think, do you want to give it a try? [0]
> If so I certainly hope people that think like you never attain any real power
Well, don't worry. The con-artists, faudsters and moochers from the swamp have everything under control and from what I see the populace-at-large is not interested in mitigating the pain and suffering and damage that crony-capitalism is brought upon us in or in correcting the course towards societal collapse which that entails. The hucksters meanwhile will continue to squeeze every last dollar of profit everyone else while their bought-and-paid-for politicians make sure that nurses and teachers and - well, everyone else, there a theme for you - pays a higher share of their income in taxes than their masters, while they themselves gorge on the ill-gotten gains their corruption, leaving behind the soiled and despoiled corpses of land and people.
The only alternative is raising taxes, the horror.
But hey, all power to you.