The opposite is also true. The vast majority of consumers spend their money domestically. Yes the products they buy are often imports but in many cases a big chunk of the money goes to cashiers, delivery drivers and so on.
Of course I am simplifying this a bit. In theory the roles can switch and business owners spend more domestically and consumers spend more abroad but as it is right now the rich just invest into Chinese businesses or production capacity in China. Think of companies like Tesla building factories in China.
They can also just hoard most of it and pass it on to their descendants -- this is how you get dynasties. Tax havens and creatively constructed foundations are another way of making sure the government never gets ahold of their money.
The individually wealthy are not required for the aggregation and allocation of capital. Governments and financial systems are typically more capable at achieving this requirement in a welfare-maximising manner.
If anything, I would expect “trickle-down economics” to have reduced globalization, since it allows for cheaper American labor. Of course this doesn’t mean we should embrace trickle down policies, but that we should make sure we prevent jobs from flooding overseas as we dismantle them.
In the poorer country, it creates a class of ultra-rich businessmen who rule over the ultra-poor laborers (and those laborers must remain ultra-poor otherwise the jobs would flow back to the laborers in the wealthier country).
Not only that, but the poorer country isn't going to adhere to environmental standards of the wealthier country (absent coercion a la border adjustments), and so it basically becomes a way for businesses in the wealthier country to continue to enrich themselves by way of pollution (and otherwise mismanagement of environment).
Boy, an accurate assessment of supply-side economics if there ever was one: "let the plebs pick through our shit to see if we left any excess for them".
Funny enough in that analogy: you're feeding the horse because you care about its well-being and it's doing something helpful in return, whereas the sparrows are actually a nuisance providing no value to anybody and just taking without giving anything in return.
As oppose to 'demand side' i.e. give tax cuts or money to the poor - they spend it, the economy grows.
Would you rather live in a world where there’s only 1 large firm because over regulation has created a high barrier to entry and little incentive to risk starting a competitor, or a world with many firms where it’s easy for people to compete and they’re incentivised to do so?
That's at least partially because the wealthy have the means to hire lots of smart people to create sophisticatedly misleading propaganda for them, and make sure it's widely disseminated and influential.
We built something that brings out our worst demons.
The idea has been around in some form or another for a long time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#History...
The most recent reincarnation was known to be not very good economics from the get-go:
> What I want to talk about is when, exactly, the GOP went over the edge. Obviously it didn’t happen all at once. But I think the real watershed came in 1980-81, when supply-side economics became the party’s official doctrine.
> I’m not sure, even now, whether people who aren’t involved in economic policy discussion understand that supply-side wasn’t a doctrine like monetarism or even real business cycles — ideas I may think are wrong, but which had and to some extent still have significant support from professionals in the field. Supply-side economics never had any evidence behind it; it never had any support in academic research; it barely even had any support among economic researchers and forecasters in the business world. It was and remains crank economics pure and simple, with nothing going for it except political convenience.
> Yet 35 years ago the GOP was already willing to embrace this doctrine because it was politically convenient, and could be used to justify tax cuts for the rich, which have always been the priority.
> And given this, why should anyone be surprised at all the reality denial and trashing of any kind of evidence that followed? You say economics is a pseudo-science? Fine. First they came for the economists; then they came for the climate scientists and the evolutionary biologists.
* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/the-gops-origin...
He has an entire section on this in this recent book Arguing with Zombies, along with how the GOP are worried about deficits and debts when they're out of office, but then don't once they're in power (e.g., tax cuts in the December 2017 budget):
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
* https://www.worldcat.org/title/arguing-with-zombies-economic...
Regardless, it's still the central dogma of the politics of a large part of population.