Reply #28: Say WHAT? [View All]

[Literate Dragon]

OK, look. First of all, it's not "trickle down" unless the tax cuts are targeted to the very rich, and I don't mean the top 10% I mean the top 1%, the owner class, the ones Republicans are fond of calling "job creators." When you focus on differences in income below that level and consider THAT to be the "inequality" the country has a problem with, you are being diverted. The problem is that the richest 1% of Americans haul in almost 25% of the aggregate income, not that an experienced computer programmer makes more money than a McDonald's burger-flipper. Both the programmer and the burger-flipper are not among the rich, they're among the "everyone else."

Secondly, you are calling something a "transfer up" that isn't. A transfer up is when someone at the top gains and someone below the top loses, not when someone way below the top gains but someone not so far below the top gains more.

And third, this is not trickle down, it's trickle up, because it starts with putting money in the pockets of people who will use it to buy things rather than in the pockets of people who will invest it. Because meaningful, job-creating investment happens in response to consumer demand, not because money is burning a hole in the pockets of investors.

The rich -- I mean the real rich, not the not-as-poor-as-I-am people that you seem to be confusing with them -- will gain very little from this tax cut, and most of them will gain absolutely nothing, because all of their money comes from investments and capital gains rather than from employment. Even those who do have paid jobs, like the CEOs of big corps, will only gain a tiny percentage of their total income, because the on-paper pay for those jobs is only a small part of their income to begin with and they're taxed for SS only on a fraction even of that.