Trickle Down Theory

On Nov. 6, Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income.

via Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight. – The Washington Post.

This is from the….insanely partisan…guy who ran the campaign that lost the Presidential election. This is whining to a huge degree…but I wanted to focus on this one sentence.

You see….we’ve had 30 years of “trickle-down”/”supply side”/”Laffer Curve” economics from the Republicans. From Reagan to Bush the Lesser they kept cutting taxes on the wealthy, and saying that the wealth would trickle down and the rising tide would raise all boats.

This simply hasn’t happened. For the majority of the country, wages have been stagnant. For folks like Romney, they’ve gone up huge.

This trend continued during the Great Recession.

In 2010 median net worth in the U.S. hit its lowest point since 1969 at $57,000, according to a recent study by NYU Professor Edward Wolff, who studied Americans’ net worth from 1983 – 2010.

During the same period, income inequality skyrocketed in the U.S., Wolff found, largely thanks to the housing bust, which took a significant bite out of middle-class Americans’ assets. Wolff found that while middle income earners lost 18 percent of their net worth, those in the top 1 percent increased their wealth by 71 percentover the same time period, according to Wolff’s report.

[full story]

So my point here is that if Republican economic theory actually worked, and the wealth actually tricked down, and the rising tide actually lifted all boats…we wouldn’t have such a large portion of the country making so little money.

If Republicans economics worked, they’d be in the White House right now. It doesn’t, and they aren’t.

Note: Reading Stevens “reasoning” (put in quote for a reason…go read it), I am not at all surprised Romney lost so badly. His notion of who is voting Democratic (and why) is wildly off the mark.

When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.

See….he’s claiming that Romney won…even though he lost. He’s claiming Republican ideas won…even though they lost. He’s going to keep claiming they work…even though they don’t.

There’s little help for folks like this. But we should certainly take a moment and laugh at them, especially when they claim stuff like this.

Ding Ding!!!

And we have a loser…

McCain takes one to the gut that he thinks from

I might throw up some real analysis of the debate later, but I think this one was great on the split screen. I didn’t watch it with the dial-thingies, I really don’t like ’em, at least the first time through.

When you watch the debate (which can be quite boring and technical) with the dial, you tend to watch the stats, not the game. Kinda like all those “fantasy” players. Head lost in the numbers, they forget to enjoy the fact that it’s a game.

Politics, on the other hand, is a different kind of game, as the winners get the right to declare war on people and use nuclear weapons. So the sports things is fun and all, but as a metaphor it ultimately fails.

In that line of argument, I would have to say that of the two candidates, I liked the calm, friendly, smart one. Not the eye-rolling, thunderstruck, attacking one.

McCain seemed to be giving a lecture on conservative politics from the early 80’s, when he was elected to Congress. He seems to have missed what he has wrought with those policies. What policies you may ask? Cut taxes and spend.

Republicans always complain about Democrats being “tax and spend.” The sad part is that they do so with such vigor that their supporters (and even some themselves) miss the fact that “cut taxes and spend” is an even worse theory. Here’s the graph for the Federal debt since John McCain went to Congress in 1982.U.S. Debt Since McCain went to Congress.

U.S. Debt Since McCain went to Congress.

[source]

Pay special attention to that part of the top graph post-1982, when John McCain went to Congress.

THAT’S WHEN IT GOES CRAZY!! Is it a conicidence?

Not really, IMHO, as McCain continued to advocate all sorts of new programs and government support (buying mortgages [$300,000,000], buying banks [$?], fighting autism [$?], fixing healthcare [$?], winning wars [$?], achieving energy independence [$?], ) while at the same time arguing VERY stenuously against any posibility of raising any kind of tax on anything anywhere. In fact…saying he is going to…somehow…enact a spending freeze. Does that make any kind of sense at all? It works emotionally….”I’ll solve all your problems for less than free…”

[UPDATE: real analysis of the debate…listening while writing…late..McCain even goes to the point of using “Joe the Plumber” to accuse any type of tax increase as being against “The American Dream”….and in fact denying it. That’s crazy. It’s not “Joe’s the Plumber’s” money that needs to be spread around. It’s the guys who got $125,000,000,000 is bonuses the last 6 years…remember…those guys on Wall Street!!?!

“No one likes taxes, let’s not raise anyone’s taxes. O.k.?” Yea..and then let’s get high on Unicorn farts and live in peaceful communities sharing the means of production. Sounds great on paper. Works like shit on Earth.]

Unfortunatley, this is the type of politics that leads to a graph like the one above.

And he views any tax on anything anywhere to be a tax on everyone everywhere. It’s crazy, and it’s the exact same philosophy that Reagan and W used to run up such a huge debt. Bush I raised taxes and Clinton slowed the bleeding, even reversing it before W & The Republicans used the same “trickle-down, supply-side, voodoo, laffer-curve, tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves, debts-dont-matter” economics to erase $11,000,000,000,000 of U.S. wealth in just two weeks.

It’s a political and eoconomic philosophy the market just went crazy proving was nuts. An idea built on the confidence that it was true, rather than evidence it made any rational sense.

AND IT’S JOHN MCCAIN’S GUIDING ECONOMIC PRINCIPLE.

Check the 26-year record since he’s been on the dole in D.C. It speaks for itself. Very, very loudly.

Joe the Plumber notwithstanding, you have to pay for that lunch ’cause ain’t nothing free in this world except nothing and….as some would have you believe….tax cuts.