Monday, February 2, 2009

The Problem With Bail-Outs

It’s been nearly 30 years.  When are we going to realize that
Ronald Reagan’s misguided economic strategy, Supply-Side
Economics, a.k.a “trickle-down economics”, is a complete
failure. It’s inherently flawed and illogical, and our
country has been on the wrong path since its implementation.
The government actually takes money (in the form of taxes)
from the little people (ordinary citizens who make less than
a gazillion dollars a year) and gives it to the large
corporations and the super-rich (in the form of tax shelters
and incentives and subsidies and various other loopholes
which remain unavailable to ordinary citizens) and they claim
that some of it will trickle back down to the little people.
Those corporations and the super-rich are structured so that
all the money in our economy funnels through them at some
point, and they plan to hold on to every dime they can.

The government takes a few slices from every loaf earned by
every regular person. Then it gives those slices to a
relative handful of people who basically already own their
own bakeries. The result is that the many have
significantly smaller loaves, while the few have enough
slices piled up to feed a Super Bowl crowd. Then what?
The rich then allow some of us to work for them. We staff
or fuel or repair or whatever their yachts and private jets,
or they let us clean their mansions or wash their Ferraris
or raise their over-privileged offspring, or we work in
their companies, thereby “earning” back a few crumbs that
trickle down from the slices that were ours in the first
place. If we don't work directly for them, we buy their
products, which earns them huge profits because the
products are produced for pennies in Third-World sweatshops
rather than by properly paid American workers.

Next, they use their slices of bread to hire lobbyists who
"work with" lawmakers to ensure that their taxes stay low
and that there won’t be taxes on the inheritances they leave
their children. That way their over-privileged offspring,
who are already Ivy League legacies with guaranteed jobs
waiting in family businesses, law firms, and foundations,
will hit the ground way ahead of everyone else without
having to try. All the while, they shout in favor of making
government smaller by eliminating entitlement programs which
help the poor and feed the hungry, and proclaim that
everyone else should pull themselves up by their own
bootstraps.

How can we blame them if we keep letting them get away with
it?