They Think We Are Stupid

The Republicans think you and I are stupid. They are dusting off “trickle down economics” for another go around.

Trickle down economics was the scheme advanced by Ronald Reagan that if America only made rich people massively richer with staggering tax cuts, ending anti-trust regulation, and government subsidies for their industries, they would use all that extra free money to build new factories, hire people, and the abundance would trickle down to the average worker.

It was a lie, but it wasn’t the first time the GOP had tried that lie. Then knew exactly what they were doing, and what outcome it would produce. Instead of raising the pay of their workers, the rich people on the receiving end of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts simply added the cash to their investments.

In the Reagan go around, even the rich were skeptical, stating that the owners weren’t “job creators,” (Remember that ploy?) in that it was customers who were the job creators. Any time the number of customers for your product increased, that is the demand for your product increased, production had to increase to meet the demand and so more workers needed to be hired. Any business owner who expanded production in the hope that demand would grow to buy those products was usually soon out of business.

But then again, maybe we are stupid. When Trump proposed his huge tax reductions, mostly for the wealthy, pundits point out that the last time that had happened, there were no new jobs created and the wealthy used their increased wealth for stock-buybacks and other investments that were to increase their wealth even more. There was no outrage raised against the Trump tax cuts, so they were pushed through and what was predicted by the naysayers is actually what happened, again.

The GOP exists to serve the morbidly rich and no one else. And they have been doing it for a long time. Back in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century there was the “horse and sparrow” theory of taxation.

“The sales-pitch was that if you fed horses extra oats, more than they could normally digest, they’d pass through all that undigested oat into their manure for the sparrows to pick at; rich people’s excesses, in other words, would spill over to the average “sparrow” working person. It was embraced by Republicans in Congress and not only didn’t it work; it was blamed, in part, for the ‘Panic of 1896.’” (Thom Hartman)

Then the same scheme was advanced in the 1920s, leading the the famous stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression worldwide.

Then Reagan advanced his “supply side economics,” exactly what you should not do in a demand-side economy.

And, of course, the morbidly rich were convinced that politics did not sully their reputations and so they proceeded to buy the Congress, the Supreme Court and even the Presidency.

The rich have been fighting against paying their share of the tax burden in this country since Thomas Jefferson’s time. Giving them more money just fuels their efforts to pay less and less and less.

Oh, and the states are performing their role as the “laboratories of democracy” for the nation as a whole.

“Republicans have been hustling this scam for over 150 years, and in the states they control educational outcomes are plummeting, child and infant mortality is skyrocketing (along with homicides), and infrastructure threatens to disintegrate as funding cuts come online.” (Thom Hartmann)

The Republicans want a return to the conditions of the Gilded Age; they haven’t had servants to serve them since that time, so a new under-class is needed and they are creating one. The middle class is shrinking rapidly and soon there will only be the rich and the poor left, with the poor having to take any job they can get, which often means the same thing as industrial servitude, or personal servitude as “house staff” for the rich.

I end with another quote from the inestimable Thom Hartmann—

“Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 43 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

“It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked. For example: Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

“Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 43 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 43 years of Reaganomics, it now takes two full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.”