The Supply Side Lie

Post war until roughly the 1970s, increases in income in all quintiles more or less moved together. The bottom quintile increased with the top quintile. Since the 70s, the top two quintiles continued to grow, with the top quintile actually accelerating (although to be fair, it corrected/adjusted during the Great Recession, but only modestly). But since the 1970s, the bottom three quintiles have been pretty much flat.

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The Stock Market Soared In 2013, So Where Are The Jobs?

Free-market capitalists, which apparently is just about any Republican these days, tell us government is too burdensome to businesses and we need to cut taxes. Their standard message for how to get the economy moving is to cut taxes and get government out of the way. There’s just one problem, the economy, at least as measured by the major stock indexes, finished 2013 with tremendous gains, and that means the personal economy of so-called “job creators” is doing quite well. How’s your personal economy coming along?

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Fixing America: The Republican all style, no substance approach could spell misery for us all

Let’s face it, Republicans are much better at messaging. They’ve had decades of practice in what to say and how to say it to get their message across. To be certain it’s all style and no substance, but Republicans are really good at it. Republicans have a way of framing a solution to a (real or imagined) problem so that the public hears it and believes that it is a common sense approach to an apparently serious problem. But Republicans count on the thought process ending right there. If people do a little more research and consideration of all the facts, a lot of Republican “ideas” start to break down. I’ll give you two examples.

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Video: ‘Death Spiral Of Falling Demand’ – Venture Capitalist Nick Hanauer On Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer

Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer explains why people create the demand which then creates the jobs. He says he makes 1000 times more than the average worker but that doesn’t translate to 1000 times the consumerism of the average worker. He can’t makeup the difference. So with more wealth accumulating within a small pool of wealthy people, that means less wealth spread across the rest of the country. It means less purchasing power and less demand for products and services from tens and hundreds of millions of Americans. This is why supply side (trickle down) economics doesn’t work. We’ve tried it for 30 years. How many more years do we need to continue failed economic policy before we wake up and realize it will never work?

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Supply Side (Trickle Down) Economics Doesn’t Work. Can We Move On Now?

This topic will never die on The Left Call, at least not until people stop believing the lie that is trickle down economics. This idea that we need to give rich people more money in the form of tax cuts before they will create more jobs would make for a nice laugh if it wasn’t so damaging to the country and to the prospects of income and wealth equality. And when I say equality, I don’t mean totally equal, I’m talking about getting back to something more reasonable, a time when CEOs only made 30 times the average worker instead of 300 times.

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