Ah yes, the good ol' trickle-down economics.
A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest.
To create vast wealth generally requires vast resources, which requires vast amounts of people. Behemoths the size of Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, et al employ significant chunks of the population - and not just directly.
Trickle-down doesn't mean everyone will be a millionaire by doing nothing... instead, it means a ton of smaller companies are boosted while servicing larger companies, and so on - spreading wealth around in terms of employment and providing people with a living they can fairly earn.
I don’t mean to trivialize the complicated nature of the matter, with the effects of the world wars and globalization + many other factors, it is hard to separate things, but it really does not seem all that difficult to argue that trickle down economics is not better than what we were doing before and to do so in good faith.
Of course, the actual goal of trickle down economics was to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few and in that regard it is undeniably a success.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
The nation's poorest are not provided with a fairly-earned living. They are working themselves to death while not even earning enough to survive, and they can't get any other job because those "smaller companies" have been killed by the behemoths outcompeting them by using exploitative labor practices.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trick...
Complete nonsense. You can look at the real-world effects.
Or the economists, who have done so and do not support it at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Economi...
The citations that you want are linked there. Are you seriously saying that the whole "Economics" section of the Wikipedia article on trickle-down economics is "not good faith"?
Trickle down is a failure at its stated aims. It does not work. It never worked, and now people have noticed.
> A rising tide obviously raises all ships
A metaphor proves nothing. I might as well say "when money is concerned, no it doesn't: it's every man for himself" and leave it at that.
Let me ask you one thing in addition: can you explain why "trickle-down" economics is superior to "trickle-up" economics: where the money goes directly to those poorest who need it, cutting out the middle-men; and then when they spend it until it inevitably trickles up to businesses and the more well-off?
How does does "trickle-down" economics compare to that?
To throw a wrench in that tired metaphor: a rising tide may raise all ships, but a fat lot of good that does to the poor, if it's only the well-of that can afford to buy a boat.
Even the poor do better when there's more jobs available, more job mobility, more housing, more stores, etc. All things that are created by wealthy companies and individuals.
Everyone, including our poorest, benefit from a growing economy.
We just have to examine our average poverty-level person, and compare them to poverty-level persons of other nations to understand this point.
Only if those jobs offer a livable wage. If instead they are McJobs that result in workers spending more than they earn (e.g. SNAP), then poor people are doing worse, and it's a net-negative on society.
Why are people stagnating instead of moving up? That's a really good question.
If you are not "supposed" to earn a living wage, then the job should not exist. It's a simple matter of supply and demand: if you can't afford to pay your laborers a living wage, you have obviously failed as a company because you are unable to exist without slave labor.
> This misses the reason so-called McJobs don't pay a "living" wage.
Yes, this reason is called "profit". They pay so little because it is legal to do so, and people would rather work three jobs than see their kids starve.
> You're supposed to develop skills and move up in the working world.
If everyone moves up, who is going to do those jobs? And how exactly are you supposed to develop those skills if you have to work three jobs just to survive? There are only so many hours in a day, you know.
And most importantly, how do you account for the fact that in the U.S. there are about 53 million people in low wage jobs, but only about 33 million high school and college students? What are those other 20 million workers “supposed to” be?
It's a difficult question to answer thoroughly, but there should be a few obvious factors. Most of the labor market is effectively priced out of acquiring higher valued skills/degrees that would improve their career. Their opportunities for advancement are laughable.
So, then, why is that?
Also parent: Why are people stagnating instead of moving up? It's a real puzzle.
No I'm not. I know exactly the point you were making. I'm disputing it.
The problem is the devil is in the details, and both the tired metaphor and your defense of it leave those details unspecified.
There is no good faith argument that exists to prove this incorrect.
> other economic articles, statistics, etc
Ah well, you're wrong. "other economic articles, statistics, etc" clearly do not support this.
I mean, "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." but lets bring the citations:
> trickle-down economics has never been advocated by any economist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Economi...
Did you know that?
Oh how far we’ve come since the economy of the 1960s.