TRMS. Ronald Reagan's Trickle-Down Economics Failures

[Sky Masterson]

Run time: 08:27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63LrW-0Cv2M   Posted on YouTube: April 24, 2011 By YouTube Member: matsubara97 Views on YouTube: 24   Posted on DU: April 24, 2011 By DU Member: Sky Masterson Views on DU: 4925

 
A rising tide drowns all who can't afford to buy a boat.

[Sherman A1]

1. K&R Well Said

:kick:

[PotatoChip]

2. We need to keep driving this point

over and over again until even those apathetic to politics 'get it'. AND make sure they know which party has been pushing this agenda for the past 30 years.

[cutlassmama]

3. I was just thinking about the old codger today. He's done more

harm...throwing mothers off welfare and now children have grown up and are in prison; now all the mentally ill and retarded are out on the streets because he closed the hospitals; not to mention taking us off the gold standard. He is one POTUS we could have done without!

[cantbeserious]

6. Ahh So Grasshopper - Twas The Plan All Along

eom

[SemperEadem]

18. he was the worst thing that ever happened to this country

we have been paying for his bullshit ever since.

[HolyCity2012]

4. Ronald Reagan Raised Corporate Taxes

REAGAN: "We’re going to make it economical to raise children again. Flatter rates will mean more reward for that extra effort, and vanishing loopholes and a minimum tax will mean that everybody and every corporation pay their fair share."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x574604

[xxqqqzme]

15. Ah, I see you were not a single

parent raising two children on $17,000/yr during st ronnie's reign of terror.

[HolyCity2012]

16. Read in to things much?

Take it for what it's worth, a link to a video and op-ed from "Think Progress".

Not taking things at face value seems to be a major problem here at DU.

People tend to find their own meaning without considering the literal.

[cantbeserious]

5. Debating These Facts With Reagan Lovers Is Akin To Debating With Rocks

Works well for those honing their arguments but accomplishes little.

So brainwashed is the country about Reagan.

[Volaris]

11. this might seem a bit trite, but I would pose the question to you....

Honing ones skills against rocks is a noble endeavor indeed, but to have any demonstrable IMPACT, isn't it better to use an argumentative sledgehammer? and isn't that one of those tools that the Dem's used to have?

(I think the answer is that ELECTED Democrats seem to have stopped using it, and Rachel picked it up off the ground, and said "HEY COOL!!!! Now I have something to HIT things with!")
=)

[HolyCity2012]

12. plus one

[cantbeserious]

14. Take Your Point - My Point Was Simply That Debating Reagan With Republicans Is Useless

eom

[indy legend]

25. You can argue these facts with the right wing, Fox watching,...

tea fuck, morons out there until you are blue in the face. You can show them the simplest charts illustrating the most basic obvious facts and beat them over the head with it until you are exhausted . You can't win an argument with people who are so hopelessly and willfully fucking stupid.Facts are inconvenient for these idiots. It gets in the way of what Fox,Rush and Beck have told them they believe.

[ooglymoogly]

20. +1 nt

[Enthusiast]

27. Oh, about once every

morning on C-Span's Washington Journal some Reagan worshiper calls in to say revenues increased under Reagan after he cut taxes. Brainwashed to the extent that they repeat untruths decades after the fact.

[madlefty]

7. The father of deregulation, the beginning of all the mess were in

Why the right worships this guy I'll never know. The first thing he did was to fire the air traffic controllers that led to deregulating the airlines and to the abolishment of a lot of regional carriers and a bunch of mergers and fuxxed-up air travel today, it is nothing but a cattle call. It used to be special to fly, Coach then was like first class today. I remember one of the psychics ,then predicted he would be elected and lead this country to rack and ruin and He or she was right..............

[Atypical Liberal]

8. Maddow nails it again.

Nice video. K&R.

"Trickle Down" was, and is insidious. It sounds logical. "Hey, those rich people have to spend that money on something! They will create jobs when they spend and invest!"

I think the heart of the problem is the fact that average Americans just don't understand how imbalanced the game is. They don't understand how massive the wealth gap is, nor how massively weighted the wealth is at the top. When Regan passed his 25% tax cut across the board, it probably sounded good and fair to everyone. "Hey, we all get to pay 25% less taxes! I get to keep 25% more of my money!" But what people failed to realize is that a 25% increase in the common man's salary is nothing compared to a 25% increase in a billionaire's salary. It's the difference in dumping 25% of the contents of your bathtub on your bathroom floor or dumping 25% of the contents of your swimming pool on your bathroom floor. People just don't understand the disparity, so things seem fairer than they really are.

I also think the real problem with the trickle down was not the trickle. No doubt their increased wealth did get spent and invested and may have trickled down. But this was more than offset by the power of their massively increased wealth, which allowed them to gain even more wealth, eating up more of the pie. The amount of wealth they were able to gain offset what they spent. The tax cuts triggered a steamroller of wealth accumulation.

[xxqqqzme]

17. Agree. During the reign of

poppy doc bush, I was dating an accountant, who thought trickle down was just grand! He swallowed the entire jobs creation myth. There was generational wealth on my mother's rethuglican side, and there was never one job created, except domestic or gardener. I told him, then, it would never happen. More wealth gets stashed or invested, it is not spent on job creation.

[NCcoast]

9. Thank you, thank you, thank you...

I posted a journal just the other day asking 'Why don't I hear this said everyday?'. If we allow the GOP to continue giving tax cuts to the wealthiest the deficit will continue to explode and they'll keep using that as an excuse to discontinue all social programs while supporting the privatization of everything. That's the plan. That's what been going on forever and it's been working like a charm.

In the end we'll be pay whatever our overlords demand for all goods and services or do without. It won't create a more efficient world, as we were sold. It will create a world of haves and have nots, dept slaves and oligarchs. Endless wars for profit, incarceration for profit, health for profit, water for profit, the vast majority kept living on a desperate edge so a chosen few can live lives of unimaginable opulence. That's the world they envision. And if you think there's any end to it look at the Kochs. A hundred billion more will not satisfy them. They most have it all.

[Volaris]

10. time index 6:39-6:45...

John, we already gave those people a TRILLION or so dollars of our tax money to do just that. DID THEY????? No they did not. They put it in their accounts, and are sitting on it to this day. SOME of us expected no less from the people (did I say people? I meant sociopaths) who nearly destroyed the American Economy in the first place.

You and yours, not so much with the smart on that one.
and Eric, Mike, and Scott..."wherever you are out there.....FUCK YOU TOO."

As always, Peace
=)

(and bonus points if you know the film that the quotations are from)=)

[BlueJazz]

13. One other good point made in the video >>>

The notion that the rich use money for job creation was bullshit back then just as much as it's bullshit now.

In the 80's sales of outrageously expensive items such as Furs, diamonds, Yachts, second vacation homes and such
went THROUGH THE ROOF.

I guarantee ya, the buyers were not the middle class or the poor.

[Atypical Liberal]

34. Well, to be fair...

To be fair, someone had to manufacture the furs, diamonds, yachts, and homes.

I think the real problem with tax cuts for the wealthy is not the lack of trickle-down. Yes, they spend and invest their money, and yes, this trickles down.

The real problem is that the tax cuts rapidly accelerate their personal wealth growth. This increases the wealth disparity and accelerates the imbalance of wealth to the top few of society, in spite of what they are trickling down. This means that they acquire even more wealth, which gives them even more influence over government policy, which allows them to accumulate even more wealth, and so on. It snowballs.

In short, the massive power tax cuts convey to the wealthy minority offsets any benefit that my trickle down. Trickle down ignores the fact that allowing the wealthy to get even more wealthy pushes society into a plutocracy. When that happens, whether their wealth trickles down or not is irrelevant.

[BlueJazz]

36. What you say is True. I feel (as you do, I'm sure) that the short term ...

..gains for the people making the furs, yachts and such is nowhere near as uplifting if the...ah... commoners had the extra money in the first place.

[SemperEadem]

19. the consistency of the thugs

is that they talk a good game about jobs, growing the economy, dealing with the deficit, but the fact of the matter is, they are worse than the rich high school guy who crashes his new car and his folks keep buying him a new one to crash again, over and over... Put them in power and see our country sink into 3rd world poverty.

[Red Knight]

21. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts

Shouldn't he have put his foot down?

He loves Reagan and I'm not so sure there's a big difference between them.

[HillbillyBob]

22. Drizzlin shits

nt

[TatonkaJames]

23. Someone should compile the data

from 1980 to present day of the taxes corporations and the wealthy saved, then look at how they invested it.
Was it for jobs, retooling their factories, or offshore accounts ?
With 50,000 companies closing it's doors and moving overseas, I think that alone answers how Reganomics worked.
And they're still trying to push this archaic idea ? If this ever happens again, if we the people allow our reps
to pass any tax cuts that benefit only the wealthy, then my theory of "The Dumbing Down" of America
is complete.

[szatmar666]

24. Rach made a minor error

1st the National Debt was $994 BILLION in 1981, not MILLION!!! Big difference. What she didn't do is contrast the 30 year period before 1981 and after:

National debt:
1946: $275 BILLION or 121% of GDP (=$221 BILLION)
1981: $994 BILLION or 32% of GDP (=$3.1 TRILLION)
today: $14 TRILLION or 85% of GDP (=$15 TRILLION)

So while the GDP skyrocketed 13X in the 1946-1981 period with the National Debt growing only 3X, after 1981 EXACTLY the opposite happened: the debt skyrocketed 14X and the GDP only grew 5X.

The most important fact about taxes before Reaganomics is that taxing the rich was a way to force money back into the real economy: if you decided to keep your company profits as personal income you used to lose a lot more of that money than if you re-invested it. that's why personal income taxes on the top earners HAVE to be higher than the top corporate tax rate. In effect the Reagan tax cuts were a giant engine of deindustrializing America.

[HolyCity2012]

26. Laugh Out Loud!

[Enthusiast]

28. Excellent post.

The nation has never recovered yet there is a massive collective illusion that something positive came from Reagan's policies.

Today we see this illusion carried to the extreme. It is as if we awoke one Easter Sunday morning to find that millions of Americans actually believe in the Easter Bunny.

[szatmar666]

30. thanks, americans are

suckers for self destructive right wing nonsense for the same reason russians were suckers for communism: it feels good to have your collective boot on other people's throat, and we like it or not a majority of human beings are motivated by a false sense of superiority and just sheer cruelty.

[spooked911]

31. yeah, that was weak-- she said he grew the debt a massive... 186%

uh, so what?

[szatmar666]

33. that's not exactly accurate

the debt grew 13X or 1200% since Reagan and 2.4X or 140% under Reagan alone. The debt under Reagan went from $994 bn to over $2.35 TRILLION. By 1993 it was $4.35 trillion or 66% of GDP. Papa Bush was a fierce spender: he doubled the national debt in 4 years, 1st time in history, even Reagan took 8.

Every year since 1981 a republican presented a budget to Congress, the National Debt grew faster than the GDP by the end of that budget year. Every year before Reagan under both republicans and democrats the opposite was true. That's not a simple coincidence.

Every republican should be fed this document, especially Section 7:

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy12/pdf/BUDGET-2012-TAB.pdf

[spooked911]

29. It started out good, but then really wasn't that impressive

didn't even mention the Bush years, or talk about economic growth overall.

[The Wizard]

32. Back to the 50s

How about raising corporate taxes and closing the current loopholes while introducing others that reward business for putting Americans to work.
Republicans still cling to Reagan's bizarre and flawed supply side babble.
Trickle down: Upper management gets golden parachutes, and the working class gets golden showers.
Republicans are obviously insane or prevaricating. Insane because they keep employing the same policy and expect different results; prevaricating because it's in their DNA.
In essence they're liars and thieves or crazy. In either case they're not fit to govern.

[SomeGuyInEagan]

35. Truly fantastic. Should be part of the curicullum for every HS US History and Government course.n/t