I was born and grew up on a farm with an outhouse in the 1930s during the Great Depression. I know what trickles down. I’ve seen it and smelled it. I’ve also seen a lot of horseshit, and I can smell and recognize it when I see it. We’ve been told that trickle down economics is good for us. Turns out that trickle down was just a way to hold us off until Bush and his Republican corporate cronies could turn trickle down into flood up.
Flood up is the economic principle that Bush and his Republicans have been plotting and planning for, all the while preaching the opposite, trickle down economics. Flood up is the trillion dollar or so Bush is giving to his corporate cronies in the financial business. After bankrupting the US Treasury to funnel hundreds of billions to his buddies in the private contractor, construction and private military business with his Iraq war, he’s going to have to borrow even more from other countries to pull this one off.
I was witness to what Franklin Roosevelt did to get the country out of an actual economic depression, the worst in history. He paid the homeless unemployed to work at jobs that created value for the country. He required that all of the agencies employing people on government projects buy all of their supplies only locally. This stimulated the local economies and got the money supply in circulation among the people of the United States. All of these people worked locally, bought locally and used everything locally.
Trickle down economics was the fraud that the free marketers pushed on us, trying to make us believe that by lifting all taxes, rules, regulations and restraint off the rich, we could live off the crumbs that fell from their table. The rich figured out that if we could live off of those crumbs, they had value of some kind, so they kept the crumbs, and calling them “structured investment vehicles (SIVs) and other obfuscating acronyms, sold them as assets and securities, when they were actually worthless debts, not assets.
Now that the free market has been shown to be the fraud that it always was, we’re having to supposedly “bail out” these free marketers from the mess they have made. But, that doesn’t solve anything or change anything that’s wrong with the system. When you bail out of a plane that’s going down, the plane still goes down. Bailing out a boat that’s sinking doesn’t fix the hole in the sinking boat. Bailing someone out of jail doesn’t solve the problem that put them there. Bailing out the crooks at the few financially corrupt businesses doesn’t fix the corrupt business.
How to fix the economic system to prevent this from happening has, surprisingly, never been studied. Professors of economics are very much like professors of education. They think up grand theories about how economics and education should be done without ever looking at the empirical evidence of how it is being done. Our economic and education system roughly coincide with the industrial revolution, with about 200 years or so of evidence to look at about how it actually works.
If you want to know how best to educate people, you look at the record over the years of educated people and see how they were educated. Then, you do that to educate people. If you want to know what’s the best way to run an economic system, you look at the system that provides the most opportunity to the most people for the best result, factor in the restraint necessary to prevent the greed that people in control of the system will inevitably exploit for their own profit, eliminate the opportunity for them to do that, and use the resulting system.
We have around 200 years of empirical evidence to look at to see how these things should be done to achieve the best result, and yet we still are listening, not to reasoning from the evidence, not from the evidence of cause and effect, but to the free marketers, the theories of hard right, conservative Republican economists who are apparently completely unaware of the evidence available for study. The so-called bailout is absolute, irrefutable, undeniable proof that they never looked at the evidence and that they were wrong about it all.
Reasoning from evidence and from the evidence of cause and effect is the scientific method. That method is how cars, houses and buildings get built, how cities learned how to provide utility services to their citizens, how effective medicines get developed, how men were sent to the moon and back.
We’ve had conservative, Republican ideology controlling our government and it’s economic policies since the Reagan era. They think up an ideology that is to their liking and coincidentally to their profit, and hold to and defend their ideology with religious fervor, rejecting all evidence to the contrary. They abhor the scientific method, which is the opposite, where the theory is strictly based on the observed evidence.
We’re seeing the complete, utter failure of the conservative Republican ideology, as we watch the fat cats of Wall Street drifting down in their bailout parachutes, clutching the billions they got for bailing out of their doomed plane, as we watch them sitting smugly with their billions while we bail out their sinking boat, and as we watch them bailed out of jail with their billions, leaving behind the criminal mess for us to clean up.
Yes, the trickle down has turned into a bailout, the bailout is the flood up and we’re left with a crashed plane, a sinking boat and an unresolved and unpunished crime.
