11.9.09
For those of you old enough to remember, “trickle down economics” was a catch phrase used by supply side economists in the 1980’s to explain how incentivizing business/companies, benefits would trickle down to workers in terms of new hires, pay raises etc.
many opponents of this philosophy castigated the idea so much that the phrase “trickle down economics” became a 4 letter word. The phrase is still used occasionally (in bad light of course) as a criticism. Interestingly though, the types of folks who were likely to blast TDE, now seem to be in favor of it.
If I understand correctly, bailing out AIG, Goldman Sachs, and various other financial disasters was good for all of us because, as was said, if we didn’t do it, the whole system would’ve collapsed. Who knows, maybe it would have (even though I question whether the country that survived a Civil War, 2 world wars, depression, etc would have gone down over losses at AIG), but even so, this is certainly trickle down economics. Because, I’m not sure about you, but AIG didn’t send me any money – that’s a LONG way to trickle.
Furthermore, not only was this a poor kind of trickle down economics (encouraging investment and business expansion would be much better) because it was mainly no interest loans and “preferred stock” purchases by the government, it will not trickle down – the only things that are trickling down are increasing debt burdens that we will ALL pay for with much higher taxes, but we also get super low interest rates on our savings (low rates to help Citigroup make money) which cost many retirees $5,000-10,000/year in income!
And this all has the support of many in Congress – including many who would never get on TV and say this phrase: “I support trickle down economics.”
If you want to do something about this, find out how your Rep or Senator voted on bailouts and if they helped cause this mess, vote em out in 2010. Do it.
Chris Grande
