Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for November 01, 2017

Word of advice: when somebody sez that the best way to improve your life is to give them money… take it with a grain of salt.

(Now watch the replies to this little comment EXPLODE)

Hasn’t exploded yet…

The freaking republicans have been selling that since the 1920s. I guess they can always count on gullibility.

Wait for it:

Bub bub but the rich folks spend money on stuff that employs folks!!

Blindly ignoring that more and more money is concentrated in an ever smaller fraction of the populace, so that the actual benefit of rich spending goes down. Especially when they invest in old art, real estate and things not requiring manufacturing.

Face it. If you believe trickle down is going to make your life better, you are either already rich — or completely stupid. Just like the cartoon.

Is this a follow up to yesterdays gullibility test ?

The “trickle down” is warm and wet and is known as the “tinkle down” by the pee-ons

Belief in the trickle down economy is hereditary. It runs in your genes.

Henry VIII also sold trickle down economics, and also worked his way a few wives.

But Mr. and Mrs. TRTPGTGTRGMM get to eat tasty, tasty rats….

“But at least we don’t have to put up with her emails! And BENGHAZI!”

Sorry about the repeated comments … My browser messed up. Thanks, Obama!

But they have a TV, so they must have electricity, so they must have some money, so they must be rich.

Oh yes, reduced to living in a cave and watching television without cable and/or satellite (just antenna TV).

Too many times, I’ve seen this argument turn towards “helping” the so-called “job creators”. What is never answered by the supporters of this notion is how does hiring cheap labor in third-world countries help our country economically even though we have plenty of people here who are eager to work, especially if they insist on also cutting taxes for the “job creators”?

Actually, this is a tactic used by so called “prosperity theology” preachers. “Give me more money and God will bless you will more money.” They use one obscure passage in the Bible to bilk their constituents.

Now all that said, if the Government forced the top 10% of income earners to surrender all their money to the rest of the country, we’d still have poor. I think we need another solution than pandering to the extremes.

How about trickle up? Give poor people money and they’ll spend it. Then everybody’s happy.

Funny. Leftist have use a hard time admitting this works. And think they’re the only ones that can also make communism/socialism work. Truly delusional.

Sigh….. Repost again….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/28/i-helped-create-the-gop-tax-myth-trump-is-wrong-tax-cuts-dont-equal-growth/

Four decades ago, while working for Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), I had a hand in creating the Republican tax myth.

Of course, it didn’t seem like a myth at that time — taxes were rising rapidly because of inflation and bracket creep, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the economy seemed trapped in stagflation with no way out.

Tax cuts, at that time, were an appropriate remedy for the economy’s ills.

By the time Ronald Reagan was president, Republican tax gospel went something like this:

The tax system has an enormously powerful effect on economic growth and employment.

High taxes and tax rates were largely responsible for stagflation in the 1970s.

Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was based a bill, co-sponsored by Kemp and Sen. William Roth (R-Del.), that I helped design, unleashed the American economy and led to an abundance of growth.

Based on this logic, tax cuts became the GOP’s go-to solution for nearly every economic problem. Extravagant claims are made for any proposed tax cut.

Wednesday, President Trump argued that “our country and our economy cannot take off” without the kind of tax reform he proposes.

Last week, Republican economist Arthur Laffer said, “If you cut that [corporate] tax rate to 15 percent, it will pay for itself many times over. … This will bring in probably $1.5 trillion net by itself.”

That’s wishful thinking. So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting. In reality, there’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.

And this…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-message-to-congress-dont-make-the-same-mistake-we-did-in-kansas/2017/10/19/fb6058a2-a9de-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html

“A message to Congress: Don’t make the same mistake we did in Kansas”

In 2012, Republicans in Kansas enacted a “revolutionary” tax overhaul promised to be a “shot of adrenaline to the heart of the Kansas economy.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say with certainty this promise was unfulfilled. In the following five years, Kansas experienced nine rounds of budget cuts, stress on state agencies and the inability to effectively provide the core functions of government for our citizens.

This year, the Kansas legislature — including many Republicans like me — voted to partially restore income-tax rates and to repeal a provision that allowed independent business owners to pay almost no state taxes on their income. We also overrode our governor’s veto, who opposed rolling back the tax cuts he championed.

Critics of our vote claim that Kansas didn’t cut spending enough to accompany the tax cuts.

In reality, we cut our budget through across-the-board cuts, targeted cuts, rescission bills and allotments.

Roughly 3,000 state employee positions were cut , salaries were frozen, and road projects canceled.

We delayed payments to the state employee retirement system and emptied our savings accounts.

Even as we issued more than $2 billion in new bonds to float our debt, Kansas received three credit downgrades, making that debt costlier.

In Kansas, we understand the allure of tax-cut promises. We want to believe promises of amazing growth or outcomes.

In 2012, traditional budget forecast models accurately predicted the devastating effect the tax breaks would have on state revenue.

Proponents of the plan used dynamic scoring predicting incredible economic growth and supporting their own preconceived ideas.

Today, we know which forecasts were correct.

Actually, a right-wing economics prof explains why ‘trickle down’ is indeed a myth/fallacy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbFOyTr0ajQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZPDpk8NA-gThat said, I just wish Democrats had the guts to take credit for it, like JFK:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdXrfIMdiU

PERFECT, Wiley!!

The theory of “trickle down” is that the rich create jobs and they will create more jobs if they have more money. Why would they do that? If you have a guy to mow your lawn or a housekeeper and they are doing the job adequately, would you hire someone to help them just because you had more money? Neither will the 1%ers. Unless the staff they have isn’t producing as much product as they can sell, they won’t hire more. They WILL hire more people if they have a demand for product that isn’t being met by the staff they have. Increased demand will only happen when people have more money to spend. So, no- giving the rich more money doesn’t do anyone any good, they already have more than enough. But, giving poor and middle class more money to spend will create demand,because they will spend it instead of putting it into an account in the Caymans. This will require the 1%ers to hire money people to produce the stuff the newly enriched 99% want to buy. And the newly hired staff will also contribute to the demand, so everyone is better off. Tickle down has never worked and logically never could, but trickle up is just as obviously a plan that will actually work— for everyone.

see only one problem with the majority of commenters who say that giving it to the poor/middle class will create jobs from increased demand that will lead to an increased number of jobs. That problem is where will those jobs that the 1%ers create be located? In the US? Almost certainly they will be in Central America, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, S.Korea, etc. Any US jobs will probably be as picker/packers in an Amazon facility and in customer service call centers to field complaints about the cheap stuff the consumers bought. I don’t see the US winning high paying jobs under either of the scenarios discussed by the commenters.

You might just be right! And if those goods are made in the US, the prices will rise so that those folks with the new jobs won’t be able to afford all those goods. Sounds like a catch 22 to me…

You can not and never will, legislate away the poor!

Buspopcod

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/why-we-can-all-stop-worrying-about-offshoring-and-outsourcing/274388/

First, labor costs for many businesses may no longer be the critical or even primary factor in global location decisions. Wages are rising in many emerging markets due, in part, to increased demand, new labor laws, and greater worker voice.

Second, companies are retaining but modifying their global supply chains by selectively reversing the long-term trend of outsourcing. (more in article….)

Similarly, companies which were enamored of outsourcing key service functions like information technology to nations like India are discovering that these, too, are key to fast-paced innovation and should be “made” not “bought” — bringing them back in-house, with corporate units integrated across the world under global/local management.

Even when labor is a still a significant portion of the cost of a product (e.g. textiles, toys, some electronics), there is a growing movement among major, developed world companies, as I have detailed elsewhere, to engage in responsible off-shoring and out-sourcing by adopting labor and quality standards which aim to create decent wages, working conditions and environmental protections as well as more rigorous quality checks.

Finally, companies’ choice of where to do business across the globe is heavily influenced by a witches brew of complex, often contradictory governmental policies at national, regional and local levels. Governments may seek to attract foreign investment yet also discriminate against it. (more in article….)

Welcome to Kansas!! Where Brownback’s great experiment (see above cartoon) has nearly bankrupted the state.

Wiley will cut you a check for $1000. All you need to do is give him $1000 in cash.

If a person has got more money than they can ever possibly spend, how does giving them more money possibly help the economy?

One of Wiley’s best, & that’s saying a lot.

So what’s being served tonight – Rat on a Stick (Jabberwocky) with baked beans?

And raising taxes always worked? I realize that you can’t keep cutting taxes forever, see Kansas. But you also can’t keep raising taxes forever. After all, if raising taxes was the ultimate solution then the USSR would still be around. After all, they had pretty close to 100% tax rate so there economy should have boomed according to the socialist model.

In the 1990s a CEO made 50 times the salary of the average worker in his company. In the 2000s they made 500 times the salary of the average worker in their company. Give them more money and they will spend it on their employees.

so tell me this—if I’m rich, and you give me more money why would I spend it on jobs rather than investments or new boat