Harvesting sour grapes
By Sam G. Riley
You just can’t please all the voters all the time.
The recent presidential election has brought relief to liberally inclined voters, but consternation has been writ large on America’s conservatives. All of us regardless of party are relieved to get a brief reprieve from hateful attack ads and frequent robocalls, but oh, the second-guessing now being done by the honchos of hindsight on the political right. Why did Mitt Romney lose, they ask, and then immediately answer their own question with what often sounds more like rationalizations than valid explanations.
Riley is a professor of communication at Virginia Tech.
November 15, 2012 - 8:02 AM
Mr. Riley makes a lot of good points, and I agree with a good bit of what he says. But this jumped out at me:
The utter absurdity of trickle-down economics and its specious reasoning, which demands that all breaks go to corporations and the mega-wealthies who inhabit America’s top 1percent in wealth and income. Then maybe, we are told, some crumbs will drop down to us peasants in our huts.
There is not any school of economic thought called “trickle-down economics”, nor do any serious economists advocate anything like “trickle-down economics”.
“Trickle down” is the effect of bad economic policy, such as when the government distributes newly created money to banks deemed “too big to fail”, or other favored industries primarily for political favors. The damage wrought by the inflationary monetary policy aside, we have to ask: “The banksters and corporatists get the big checks; what trickles down to the rest of us?” This is something that Washington and Wall Street practice today, irrespective of which of the major parties is in power.
So, while Mr. Riley as absolutely correct that bad economic policy is absurd and dangerous to the country, the implication that one of the party advocated something different is disingenuous, or at least reveals an ignorance of economic and monetary policy.
If he were truly concerned about economic policies that are not, in effect, trickle down, he would be advocating free market principles.
A paragraph from Wiki:
Economist Thomas Sowell has written that the actual path of money in a private enterprise economy is quite the opposite of that claimed by people who refer to the trickle-down theory. He noted that money invested in new business ventures is first paid out to employees, suppliers, and contractors. Only some time later, if the business is profitable, does money return to the business owners—but in the absence of a profit motive, which is reduced in the aggregate by a raise in marginal tax rates in the upper tiers, this activity does not occur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
To #1 (89Hoo): Yep. Today’s efforts by the Federal Reserve and the FHA are enriching the banksters and harming just about everybody else: Taxpayers have to make up FHA losses. Prospective home buyers face higher prices. Retirees see pitiful returns on their savings. And everybody faces increased inflation. I’d hate to be a retiree on a fixed pension or a young person looking for a home right now.
http://ochousingnews.com/news/the-fha-is-giving-loans-to-ponzis-to-reenter-the-housing-market
http://ochousingnews.com/news/17-of-fha-loans-delinquent-in-september-bailout-coming
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/fha-bailout-fha-getting-close-to-taxpayer-bailout-share-of-fha-market-all-mortgages/
The “official” ARRA-style stimulus actions over now, but the FHA/Fed-style stimulus actions are still running full bore. And the damage continues…