Real Time

[Mythsaje]

I've had this thought for a long time and actually wrote a letter to Bill Maher back when he was hosting Politically Incorrect. I think any number of DUers would make a great special guest to counter some of the RW talking points his RW guest spew with very few solid retorts being used against them.

ESPECIALLY the economic talking points. Their economic ideology is a crock. Always has been. Thom Hartmann REGULARLY points out the gaping holes in their economic rhetoric. I think it was last week when the guy from the WSJ Editorial Board said that there are a lot of gays who may support their economic principles and I wanted to vomit. Their economic "principles" are little more than fiscal voodoo.

If you hand the average worker a thousand dollars he wouldn't ordinarily have, for example, he or she will go out and spend it on things he or she wouldn't ordinarily been able to afford. His or her local economy will gain from it. If you did this with a MILLION American workers, the national economy would benefit from a sudden influx of domestic spending.

If you give a multi-millionaire a thousand dollars, he doesn't SPEND it. He has no need to spend it. He tucks it away in some investment or puts it in an IRA or banks it off shore or overseas. It does nothing in particular to stimulate the economy.

That's really the message Americans don't seem to be getting right now. Even in light of the absolutely inept way these morons are running this country, no one is pointing out the obvious fallacies in the whole damn ideology. It's not just their social "values," but their economic values as well.

Basically, they're full of shit.

People who are making minimum wage aren't contributing to the tax base. This is just a basic fact. If they have kids, they're actually getting more back from the system than they're putting into it. If every dime they make goes into simply surviving, their lack of discretionary funds means that they can't even put a little bit of extra into the local economy without risking financial and personal disaster.

If we make higher education so difficult to attain by allowing tuition rates to skyrocket the way they have, fewer people will ever be able to get to the point they're actually contributing to their local economies and the tax base as a whole.

This is a vicious circle. The ONLY way to assure a strong future economy is to increase the number of average Americans able to afford to spend money on things other than necessities. It sure as hell isn't by giving people who think nothing of flitting off to Europe or Asia to spend their money even MORE money to take out of the country.

We need someone out there countering their nonsense directly...in whatever venues we can manage to wrangle.

This, like Cheney himself, is a "no-brainer."

[left is right]

1. During the reign of St. Ronnie there was a counter-economic theory

called 'bubble-up' it's primary tenet was putting extra money in the hands of low income people caused the economy to grow far faster than the trickle-down theory; the working-poor (and this term wasn't actually used)bought things like refrigerators, TVs, and bikes for their kids with the extra money and in doing this they put money in the hands of freight haulers and merchants, who in turn spent money on other things like more expensive refrigerators & bigger TVs and that also put money in still more hands. As I seem to recall,this theory claimed that it was Johnson's Great Society that actually started the economic boom that would follow.
(Back peddling just a bit, yes I know there was a recession that hit sometime in the late 70's, so I may not be remembering correctly the bit about Johnson's Great Society. That or the group promoting bubble-up was just full of it.)

[Mythsaje]

2. Bush Senior called Reaganomics "Voodoo Economics."

And the basic truth of the matter is that increasing the purchasing power of those on the bottom is the best chance of actually stimulating the economy. Poor people spend money. Rich people save money.