Facts is Facts: Supply Side Economics Has Been an Epic Failure

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/24/facts-is-facts-supply-side-economics-has-been-an-epic-failure/



Sometimes there isn’t a mountaintop high enough to shout out the obvious: SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS HAS BEEN AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER! Period, end of discussion.

The facts are as clear as the nose on your face. Not only has this bastard-child of an economic scheme been responsible for the bulk of the U.S. debt over the last three decades, which the vaunted defenders of the faith fail to even acknowledge, it has been responsible for the biggest upward redistribution of wealth in this country since the 1800s – the time of the great land barons.

Just take a gander at the data from the chart above. Read it and weep. It’s easy to understand how Republicans can continue to sell a failed and morally bankrupt economic philosophy to the American public; it’s all they have left. What still befuddles the mind is how the American public keeps on buying it.

[redqueen]

1. This should finally be the death of that trickle down BS.(nt)

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

2. Kick

[quinnox]

3. K&R

This is absurd, and the United States ever growing feudal/serfdom system is to the point of collapse.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Wrong. It has been a sweeping success for the ones who devised the con.

It was a con from day one and they have been exceedingly happy at the amount of marks who buy it.

[woo me with science]

5. +1

[HughBeaumont]

13. Oh yes. It's been a tremendous success.

Uncle Milty said it'd be a success. He just never said "for who" . . . :mad:

[uponit7771]

15. +1

[moondust]

6. Inevitably resulting in OWS.

Thirty years of a supply side confidence game, mainly by Republicans but they couldn't have done it alone.

[ck4829]

7. Or has it? It's working just fine for the people at the top, maybe that's what they intended

[ItNerd4life]

8. Obama & OWS and everyone needs to be showing this! nt

[bullwinkle428]

9. That sleazy little mofo Paul Ryan was pounding the drum of trickle-down

this morning on NPR. I hope no one here was eating their breakfast at the time!

K&R.

[provis99]

10. the hilarious thing is it hurts the rich, too!

The rich have always done better when demand-side economics is used; they get some monoey under supply-side economics, but get richer at a lower rate than they would have had we stuck with demand side economics. Rachel Maddow had a great commentary on this aspect of supply side economics.

[ProfessorGAC]

12. You're Right

There is a pervasive myth, even here at DU, that the rich wanted it this way. Some may have. But, many didn't make their money by accident, and most didn't inherit it. They understand that rates of return were higher when the tide lifted all the boats.

When one has megabucks, one does not look at absolute value of increase. One looks at ROIC. It is a fact, as you stated and Rachel explained, (and most non-Austrian school economists know), that ROIC is higher when the whole economy and all strata are rising more or less the same.

There are lots and lots of old Rockefeller style republicans among the uber-rich that really didn't want this to happen.

I don't have scads of data on that. Just enough to know that everyone big money person isn't a greedy buffoon. They still may be greedy, but they're not buffoons, and if they would have made even more in the long run, they would have preferred the system that did that.
GAC

[HughBeaumont]

14. Problem is, there's only so much room at the top.

And only the useful idiots are the ones that think the wealthy want the hoi polloi to join them. Nothing could be further from reality. They work to build the moat guarding their figurative palace wider and deeper each year.

Yet people still believe they'll be the ones to beat the odds. Sad.

[provis99]

16. yep. There's nothing more American than false hope.

[moondust]

17. Those odds get worse every day.

Thanks to population growth and a few corporations swallowing up patents, people, and ideas in order to control everything that is humanly useful or desirable--and therefore profitable.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

11. Yet Cons still mired in faith-based economics and job creationism by the so-called "job creators"

They'll say and do anything to keep from seeing the truth behind their false beliefs, including trying to rewrite economic history during the last 30 years and calling what they've been doing "Keynesian" and saying that IT doesn't work. Supply side economics and cutting taxes on the rich has become like a religion to Republicans and their faith-based beliefs die hard.