Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

If you want one clear message coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99-percenters, you can boil all they're saying down into one argument; Reaganomics has failed and should die. After decades of bending over backwards to make sure that helped the wealthy become as wealthy as humanly possible, we see no real positive results. "Trickle down" economics is really the economics of scavenging -- if the wealthy have a big feast, they'll leave a lot of crumbs. And, as we shift the role of government away from helping people to helping business, even the holes left by cutting spending benefit corporations. Remember that after Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the only real positive impact the reforms had were for the financial industry. A whole new market opened up and payday loan outfits sprouted up all over the nation like mushrooms, charging usurious rates to people with nowhere else to go. And of course, poverty is at an all-time high.

If this is a successful economic model, I think I'd prefer the old "failures" of New Deal liberals, thanks.

Still, all that wealth is sitting up there, just waiting to trickle down. We've sent pots and pots of money up the economic ladder all these years with pretty much nothing to show for it -- except this:


Chart courtesy of Mother Jones

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Stealing America Right From Under Our Noses

"Yes, 'there's class warfare, all right,' warns Warren Buffett. 'But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.'"

That quote, much beloved by liberals concerned with economic justice, opens a piece at MarketWatch by Paul B. Farrell. Farrell then goes on to agree with Buffett and take the argument further; there's a "new American Civil War between the rich and the rest." Buffett, the billionaire investment capitalist behind Berkshire Hathaway, issued his warning in a New York Times op-ed back in 2006. It was true then, but it's much truer now. Led by gains at the state level, Republicans are moving to strip the poor and the middle class of things they've paid for with their tax dollars or worked for at their state jobs, then take all that money and give it to the wealthy.

But that's only the start. Writes Farrell:

Not just the 16 new GOP governors in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and across America fighting for new powers. Others include: Chamber of Commerce billionaires, Koch brothers, Forbes 400, Karl Rove's American Crossroads, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform -- which now has 97% of House Republicans and 85% of the GOP Senators signed on his "no new taxes" pledge -- the Tea Party and Reaganomics ideologues.

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