Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

@justbob But no-one can afford healthcare. No-one can afford the cost of college. No-one can afford a house, and no-one, frankly, can afford to have a decent standard of living on just one salary.

You used to be able to.

You can't now.

@G7J2O I can. I am the sole earner of my family. My wife and I own a house and 2 cars and we raised 3 children. And the cost of school and health care have not been much of a burden. Maybe you are a failure who can not provide. If you are, that is on you.

@justbob Just be grateful that you were able to do that on one salary. You are considerably older than me. You could do that back then. So could my parents.

@justbob Dude, here is the deal.

Trickle-down economics is is a story that succeeded massively for the people it was written to serve.

If its purpose was to raise wages, spread opportunity, and deliver shared prosperity, it has collapsed under the weight of evidence.

If its purpose was to concentrate wealth, weaken labour, and insulate power from democracy, it has been an outstanding triumph.

We have been sold the lie that if we feed the rich, the crumbs will nourish the rest of us. So we cut taxes at the top, deregulated finance, smashed trade unions, and sold public assets.

The result is not a rising tide but a drained estuary. Wealth flows upward, pools offshore, and stagnates there, while wages flatline and insecurity becomes the default condition of life.

This is not an accident. Trickle-down economics is a political project masquerading as common sense. It rests on a myth: that wealth is created by a heroic few and merely distributed by the many.

You know, like me, that wealth is socially produced by workers, infrastructure, education, and public institutions and is then privately captured by those best positioned to extract it.

People like you probably say but wow look at the growth figures. You ignore who owns the growth. You probably celebrate billionaires as job creators while overlooking the people whose labour actually creates jobs: the teachers, carers, engineers, and builders whose pay has been systematically suppressed.

Also, is it an accident that Bezos wants to cut 600,000 jobs and hand them to robots? Musk, a trillionaire, has ensured Tesla now runs on robots.

They're job creators? Really?

You've also already essentially called inequality an incentive even though it corrodes trust, poisons democracy, and allows money to buy politics outright. Look at Trump.

If trickle-down economics worked, we would not be living with record inequality, falling life expectancy for the poorest, and economies hooked on debt and asset bubbles. Any other hypothesis with this record would be discarded. But this one persists because failure is not a bug; it is the feature.

So no, it hasn’t “worked,” mate, but it has done exactly what it was designed to do. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the longer we allow a small minority to mistake their enrichment for our wellbeing.
Reality does not trickle down. Reality is siphoned upward, defended by ideology, and enforced through policy choices everywhere today.

Fact

@G7J2O My 32 year old son also owns a house and lives comfortably. Because he set himself goals and then did the work to meet them. It is not about age or timing. It is about working and achieving.

If you are a failure it is your fault not Ronald Reagan's.

@G7J2O Wow! I have seldom seen so much nothing all in one place as this extended rant of yours. Look up Milton Friedman some time and learn something about how modern economies really work.

You're welcome.

@G7J2O You can thank President Auto Pen Biden for that.

@justbob I’m very familiar with Milton Friedman. His prescriptions such as tax cuts at the top, deregulation, weakened unions, and shareholder primacy were implemented across the US, UK and much of the OECD from the late 1970s onward.

Since then productivity has risen, wages have stagnated, housing healthcare and education costs have gone through the roof, and wealth and political power have been concentrated at the top, particularly as there are no limits on campaign finance in America.

If Friedman’s model “works,” judge it by outcomes, not reverence, why don't you.

Which specific prediction of his has delivered broad, sustained prosperity for workers?

I'll wait.

@justbob wow you took a dark hateful turn. Lol

@justbob Regardless of you & your son's your reported success, younger people on average are doing measurably worse than 40 years ago.

In constant dollars, real wages for non-supervisory employees have barely changed even though worker productivity has grown steadily.


Home ownership rates are down, denying younger people access to the best way to build a nest egg.

Median age of first time home buyers has been rising.

The numbers don't lie, @justbob.