Repair-It

Meaning, what people say Reagan meant is not what he meant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbFOyTr0ajQ

Tom Sowell explains that there is no such thing as a trickle down theory, and goes on to explain that a business can operate many years without a profit, all while it must pay its employees. Nothing trickle down about that.

So what is meant instead?

This comment captures it:

I think the phrase was used in a Reagan speech. It's use by the left turns on the emotive power of the word "trickle." Reagan believed that everyone benefits from a healthy economy and the success of a policy could be measured not by how many people received help but by how many didn't need it.

I'd probably add that wealthy people in general are good for the economy in the form of employers and in the way they put money directly into the economy. The luxuries people use as symbols of greed? That money is paid to someone else who provided them the good or service. That maybe is another thing that is meant by "trickle down economics." I think some people have turned this into a theory (which they claim conservatives push) where somehow the advocacy is that the wealthy should pay no taxes (and I suppose the poor pay all the taxes). Aside from closing the loopholes we have a very progressive tax code already. But I digress.

kevm14 wrote:Aside from closing the loopholes we have a very progressive tax code already. But I digress.

Proof:
http://www.usfunds.com/investor-library ... Wa1Y_WcFdg

Saying that someone wants to reduce taxes on big companies or whatever is not the same as saying they should pay no taxes and I feel that false equivalence is often made.

At the very pinnacle of this bracket—the 1 percent—is where you’ll find the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffetts and Larry Ellisons. About 3 million Americans—or roughly the entire population of Chicago, the third-most populous U.S. city—are members of this often-maligned group of people. According to the Congressional Budget Office, they have an average annual income of $1,031,900 after paying an average federal individual income tax rate of 29 percent. Collectively, they account for about 17 percent of total U.S. income ($13.7 trillion in 2014), and yet their share of all income taxes paid ($1.4 trillion in 2014) amounts to 46 percent.

Facts are a bitch.

I feel like I need to collect all of these common liberal talking points and debunk them one by one, or at least the ones that annoy me the most (Tom Sowell has done a damn good job on a bunch anyway). Unless Adam is going to come in here and say "most people are centrist and don't really think those things." I think this one is very common among most people who vote blue, which is half the country. My belief has always been that those people don't really understand how the economy works. Probably because they are too busy deciding what is "fair" and "unfair."

kevm14 wrote:Unless Adam is going to come in here and say "most people are centrist and don't really think those things."

What he said.