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When Down Really Meant Up [1]
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Date: 2022-10-28
This essay is intended to be a reminder to those old enough to remember the actual events and as a warning to the younger generations about the dangers of false political rhetoric: i. e. almost everything a republican politician utters!
Ronald Reagan called it “Trickle-Down” and he promised that by giving corporations and the rich tax and regulatory relief, they would in return bring greater prosperity to the middle class and the poor. Later, to breathe new life into the falsehood, they renamed it “Supply-Side” economics and pitched it to a new generation of voters. Finally, in keeping with the magnitude of the lie itself, they immortalized it as a “Contract with America.”
In reality, the whole campaign represented what is likely the greatest promulgation of illogical economic theory and deliberate political misrepresentation in our Nation’s history.
Yet, for some strange reason, it worked even as prosperity flowed up to the corporations and the wealthy, not down to the middle class and the poor. Despite the continuing documentation of the concentration of income and wealth, voters succumbed to the false narrative making the umbrella of conservative values the new gospel of our political system.
Consider a couple of significant quantifiable results. Despite the tax breaks and deregulation at home, where did the large corporations create the promised new jobs? That’s right, first blue-collar, then white-collar jobs migrated to China, India, and other cheaper labor markets, a double dip win, (more profit, lower taxes) for the corporations. So much for the mythology of Corporate Citizenship.
This year, those same corporations have used questionable cost increases in the supply chain as an excuse to disproportionately raise their prices to gain record profits, while ignoring the misery their greed has imposed on the middle class and the poor.
In what universe does: (1) (record inflation) plus (1) (record corporate profits) not equal (2) (corporate greed out of control)? By the way, those corporations are the same ones the republicans so successfully freed from the yoke of corporate regulation and responsibility! Simultaneously, the republican lie machine has convinced the media that Biden and the democrats are responsible for inflation.
In reality, there was ample evidence from Reagan’s beginning, “tax cuts for the rich to be financed by attacks on the social support network, ” that the real republican agenda was nothing more than a front for corporations and the rich to bleed the rest of the population.
Finally, there is no doubt that the republican think tanks knew the difference between money flowing down and up, it was simply that the phrase “Vote for Trickle Up Economics” would not have achieved their objective.
It is a sad, but truthful, commentary that, only in America, are voters so gullible as to vote again and again to have their pockets picked!
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