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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