So-called Trickle Down Economics omits, which were made popular back in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan. For anybody who is too young to remember, the idea was that if you gave the top-earners the tax breaks, then they would be inclined to turn around and reinvest it in their workers (so the top would then send money down to the bottom). Sure, sounds great in theory (as most things do), but in practice that did t happen. In fact, if anything, what we have today is a direct result of trickle down economics, and we know (we already knew) that it ain’t working.
I’m curious, is there a consensus that Reaganomics was faulty entirely?
Intuitively I feel like a little bit of both is true.
If a business owner is taxed out the yin yang then he just has less capital to spend on growing his business. If he wants to grow his business by hiring more people, or other local spending, perhaps that is an undesired effect (If you believe a small business in growth mode is a more powerful engine than a government allocating spending to low bid contractors somehow)
On the other hand if he doesn’t want to grow his business by hiring people, for example by buying AI powered robots to do the jobs instead, and then laying off all the staff, then I say tax away.
First of all, I want to address those who are downvoting you: this poster asked a genuine question in good faith. It’s okay to disagree with them, but downvoting seems a bit harsh.
Ok, I feel better. 😊
Now, they have done extensive research into the failures of TDE. Also it should be pointed out that high-income earners ($216k at the time) were taxed at a marginal rate of 70%, but was drastically reduced to 38% in 1986, and of course it’s gone down since then (albeit nominally).
Your fundamental mistake here is assuming any SMEs have the scale and creative accountants to truly take advantage of this. In practice, SMEs have their lunch eaten while the mega corps really take advantage. Those large companies don’t even buy robots with these handouts, generally. They use it for stock buy-backs to enrich shareholders.
AKA Supply-Side Economics, AKA
REAGANOMICS 🤘🍕🐢
Yup. And he was the model for politicians to this day. Even Obama made efforts to emulate that twat.
Everyone points to Nixon as the catalyst for today’s political climate, and maybe they’re right. But I personally rank Reagan as the top-dog for fucking this country up. After all, if it weren’t for Raegan‘s dirty tricks, we’d have had Carter for a second term. Who knows what kind of Utopia we’d be in today if Carter had won.
Like 50% of the current american political, social, and economic downfalls can be attributed back in some way to Reagan. He really was a scourge on the world
I love that one of the first things Reagan did was remove the solar panels from the roof of the white house. What a pointless twat move.
https://youtu.be/VjCyVfBiwpE?si=8MLekJhcSOHIWsdk
Reaganomics baby!
