Trickle Down, Up, and Out

[Chris]

Capital is not fixed.

Agree, it is, in the sense of wealth, generated each exchange.



If it's concentrated that because some people have figured out you can rent-seek the government for favors and the government is more than ready to sell out.

[texan]

A decent cartoon to illustrate the difference between trickle down and trickle up.

Republicans tend to favor trickle down. Give producers of wealth tax breaks and subsidies and they will invest in business and jobs and the wealth will redistribute down. All boats rise with the tide but the wealth that trickles to the bottom is very little.

Democrats tend to favor trickle up. Give the poor redistributive wealth because they need it. Problem is they need it to purchase necessities from the wealthy and the wealth is redistributed from the middle class.

Obama seemed to understand the problem with trickle up and for a short time talked about trickle out. Give tax cuts and subsidies to the middle-class who0 are, after all, the true producers of wealth. But he was a lame duck and no one bought his argument.

All this trickling is just Keynesian economics and bound to fail anyhow. The government has no clue what it's doing.

Interesting how you gave Obama credit for doing nothing but talking. Blaming it on his lame duck status. He sounded like every dem we have ever heard.

[Chris]

Interesting how you gave Obama credit for doing nothing but talking. Blaming it on his lame duck status. He sounded like every dem we have ever heard.

Well, he was a smooth talker.

But I don't think he spent more than a couple speeches on trickle middle out.

[Refugee]

A perfect system based on a general mechical model. If you can turn a car you can tune the economy it's thought. But, right, I agree, you can't.
I beldieve the Chinese, who gained much when first adopting state-capitalism, are now seeing the ill-gains of central planning.

Every economy, bar none, that turned to socialist policies eventually collapsed. Both China and Russia returned to capitalism, countries like Zimbabwe and N. Korea didn’t. Recently it’s the turn of Venezuela to have their eyes opened. The Chinese, having learned their lesson, now have controlled capitalism and no equality to stop the very adverse affects now seen in the west. Five year plans, central planning, top-down … that’s also the European Union project and it’s an absolute disaster.

Central planning and progressivism at its best (3.10m)

Power and wealth have always been concentrated in the hands of the few, the difference now is that as poverty rises, the differences become more apparent. It’s not something people worried about thirty years ago, but it is now.

All across the west, the race is on to pretend there’s a way to produce something that is unattainable - economic equality. It always makes me smile when those from the smash capitalism, kill the rich persuasion try to vote in the very 1% they’re protesting about in the hope that they will look after them, when in reality the1% became excessively rich in the first place by not being government dependent. If welfare and government dependency raises people out of poverty, why are so many poor on it?

[Refugee]

The Chinese have a very simple system and it works. The basics are that it subsidises cheap necessities such as accommodation, food staples, transport … out of taxes paid on luxury items, or none essentials. So cars, computers and private housing are expensive, but the ones at the economic bottom get cheap basic living from the taxes paid. Conversely, in the west the excessive pursuit of profit means that the poor are out priced on even the essentials needed to preserve life.

The Chinese method puts money into people’s pockets to to those that have it to keep the economy going with investment and business, which produces employment and keeps the middle class rising to create more wealth, while those at the bottom get a cheap standard of living on the profits made from that. No equality, but no food kitchens either.

In the west, we give money to the government to distribute, which provides the illusion of wealth, but even with increasing taxation there’s never enough to go around and so it actually produces poverty.

If I have $10 and I want to buy a pizza, but I have to give you half, neither of us can now afford the pizza. The pizza company eventually goes out of business, I become poorer and we’re both reduced to scraping along on a cheap sandwich and it will never get any better for you, me or the owner of the bankrupt pizza company and his employees who are soon going to be government dependent themselves. It’s why so many businesses are going bankrupt, poverty is going through the roof, GDP is declining and the only thing booming is welfare dependency. It’s where the phrase ‘socialism runs into problems when it runs out of other people’s money to spend’ comes from. In that economic climate, eventually my company too goes bankrupt and we both now search for someone to give us part of what they earn, but there’s no one left. The bankers, politicians and corporate CEOs head off into the retirement sunset and that’s when it all collapses. That’s a re-run of every society that tried to equalise populations.