It’s by design. But in a serious country, serious world, or amongst serious people, we would’ve been laughing at the “Laffer curve” the moment Laffer ejaculated it into the napkin he first wet dreamed it upon.
But instead because we’re both as laughable as the curve itself and because the rich, industrial asshats in this country were foaming at the mouth for a thin, arguably objective, seemingly mathematical piece of horseshit to cover their “steal from the poor and give to the rich” policy preferences, reproductions of Arthur’s ejaculate were disseminated like it was the fucking Mona Lisa.
It should never be said that conservatives are conservative in the normal, adjective sense of the word. For the last fifty years, they’ve been tearing at the fraying seams of society and have been using “trickle down economics” as their seam ripper, while simultaneously blaming anything and everything other than their objectively horrific policies for the havoc wreaked.
Oh, the laffer curve is just fine. The issue is, the people who choose to missuse it deliberately or through utter ignorance never mention that the X value is about 90%. As I always say to those types whenever they bring it up:
“Theh all want to talk about the laffer curve, right up until you have to explain to them how hight the X value is. Then, as if by magic, they suddenly don’t want to talk about it anymore and never agreed with it in the first place.”
The real problem with economics, imo, is that they always presume inequality to not exist, in order to make the calculations work. The reason being that, if you accept that inequality exists and add it to the pot, as it were, the answer always comes out as “the problem is inequality.”
However, that doesn’t justify tax breaks for the rich or their rampant greed and exploitation. So, we pretend its non-existent and, tbf, in a wold with no inequality what so ever, where only the best rise to the top and anyone could be rich, if they worked for it and it wasn’t a closed shop, most of neoliberalism would be absolute genius.
Of course, the problem is that, in the real world, inequality not only exists but is the definining feature of our economy.
I’ll never understand how this image wasn’t ridiculed from the start. I mean if you are talking about “trickling down”, wouldn’t the bottom be the place where the thing that is trickling down collects?
Of course money trickles down, it trickles down from the poor to rich.
Indeed, Ronnie was and still is a big POS in my book. The USA should bring the tax brackets from the 1960’s back.
Lol. Put entertainment people in charge of the economy again. Has the public even seen how they cook the books in that industry?
There had to be a study?
Economists have written the same article for years.
This is like that Onion school shooting article that just changes the location except they count how many years it’s been since Reagan
Well, not the same article. They have to find/replace the name every couple years. Horse and sparrow, supply side, trickle down, …
I like horse and sparrow. It openly admits it’s horseshit.
It’s almost like every word a conservative (and neoliberal) says is deception or manipulation.
This cannot be solved peacefully.
Because the plan all along is generational theft.
It’s all the generations getting robbed, it’s just that each successive generation gets shafted worse than the one before. Grandma didn’t steal your retirement, the oligarchs did.
Shocked. I am shocked to the core.
I have two words: Fuck Reagan.
Reagan, both Bush’s, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and even to some extent Carter. It’s been a long dirty project. President Biden is the first to even start the project of reversing the wealth transfer, though it’s worth mentioning that Senator Biden was as bad as any president on this score.
Is this going to be like UBI studies, where the news pretends every one of hundreds of studies is the one that is breaking this news for the first time? My economics professor was taking the piss out of supply side economics over a decade ago.
Endorsement of trickle-down is usually made for the same reason as criticisms of UBI… Conservative voters are ignorant of the concept of elasticity in economics, and their politicians know it.
Some people are either unaware or like being trickled upon. Somehow there still seems to be widespread support for tax cuts to the wealthy. Somehow people seem to remember “tax cut” while either being unaware or not remembering whose taxes were cut. Somehow they already forgot when Warren Buffet made a big deal of his tax rate being lower than his secretary’s and that we should fix that. As recently as this summer I found someone surprised that the Trump tax “cuts” increased my taxes
“Trickle-Upon Economics” really does capture the vibe and the reality of the experience.
The goldfish memory of news organizations doesn’t help. If they reported this accurately it would be, “Another Study Confirms Trickle Down Doesn’t Work”
No. It doesn’t seem to me that the article pretends this one study is breaking any news for the first time. It cites other studies and individuals that have expressed the same idea for a long time. Possibly this is the first rigorous study of the 50 years from 1965 to 2015, I dunno.
This is what’s before the fold. Combined with the headline, most people are not going to come away with the sense that this is a long known thing.
Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will “trickle down” and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich.
The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes.
When it does get into it below the fold it talks about the pandemic. When it could talk about how we’ve known this for literal decades. (I love the second one. It’s six years after Reagan is elected and written by a pro-trickle down economist whose having to move the goal posts to keep defending it.)
That just sounds like regular corruption ?
with extra steps
Yeah, no shit. Something anyone remotely educated on the topic has known since the policies went into place. The problem isn’t that the information wasn’t there, it’s that no one with enough power to benefit from it is willing to do anything about it.
How about now?
