That's the myth of Trickle-down economics in action.
The amount of wealth that is redistributed is frankly insane.
> The amount of wealth that is redistributed is frankly insane.
There is no plan to make the pie larger. The problem is the same as everywhere: a public brainwashed by neo-liberal nonsense voting against their own interests. Private gains and public losses.
The error people make all the time is assuming these groups are static and always have the same people in them over time.
They don’t.
A great example were the people in the 0.1% percentile of income. Evil rich people!
Turns out people who end up in that group, only do so for a single year in their entire life.
Things like selling a company or getting a large windfall propels them into the 0.1%, then after that they fall back towards the median.
Same with the lowest income group. People move in and out that group each year.
Here is something I posted only a few days ago. It is Germany, but that point is certainly not much different from Anglo-Saxon countries.
It is a podcast, and in German too, but it is high quality and on one of the best stations in Germany (Deutschlandfunk's culture channel -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandfunk)
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...
> Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota of working-class children for executive boards.
Yes individuals can rise and fall. For example, near the big turning points in German history the people in politics were renewed, after WWII people from the working class made it to the top posts. However, with increasing stability, over the last two decades even that group has become more and more of an insider club, and people from "lower classes" have a very low chance of rising to the tops. In the economy and when it comes to real wealth it is even worse. Connections and pre-existing wealth are a good predictor of where you will end up. You may have better luck with high-paying jobs, but they rarely lead to the top of the wealth pyramid and influence.
One of the critiques of meritocracy:
> […] It’s wild that everyone is using “merit” and “meritocracy” as though it somehow avoids elitism, when in reality it’s a sneaky way to cement biases without the appearance of bias. Of course people should be judged on their skills and not their wealth. But, how’d they acquire those skills, and why would anyone assume the money didn’t help? Of course it’s a self-reinforcing system. […]
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571491
From the Wikipedia § Criticisms page:
> In his 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits poses that meritocracy is responsible for the exacerbation of social stratification, to the detriment of much of the general population. He introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", a perpetually widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the elite obtain exclusive positions thanks to their wealth of demonstrated merit, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. The elites use their high earnings to secure the best education for their own children, so that they may enter the world of work with a competitive advantage over those who did not have the same opportunities. Thus, the cycle continues with each generation.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Books
> In his book The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, the American political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the meritocratic ideal has become a moral and political problem for contemporary Western societies. He contends that the meritocratic belief that personal success is solely based on individual merit and effort has led to a neglection of the common good, the erosion of solidarity, and the rise of inequality. Sandel's criticism concerns the widespread notion that those who achieve success deserve it because of their intelligence, talent and effort. Instead, he argues that this belief is flawed since it ignores the role of luck and external circumstances, such as social and external factors, which are beyond an individual's control.[91]
* Ibid
Everything in life involves hefty doses of luck. The alternative (i.e. without merit) seems obviously worse as it would be completely luck, no?
The complaint seems to want to lower the ceiling rather than raise the floor.
There is some level of luck / chance, but one can tilt the odds: more tutoring that allows for more practice to get better in the skill(s) that are 'merited', getting into schools with good alumni networks so one can 'luckily' bump into the right people with the resources you need.
Initially good luck can breed good luck in the second iteration/generation.
The meta-criticism (if you will) is that the initial batch of merited people can lock-in things for their (grand-)kids in future batches. There needs to be a way allow opportunities for future batches if their (grand-)parents from earlier batches were not 'merited' initially. Otherwise you basically get the ball rolling on an aristocracy.
I believe people actually involved in being active against top percentiles understand the difference between ongoing millions of annual income and one off inheritance. Have you got a some reason to think otherwise? I mean it was "occupy wall street", not "occupy people visiting retirement homes".
The OP specifically called out trickle-down economics. Which is a myth, a false belief that somehow not taxing rich companies and not redistributing a country's wealth through taxes and other means, companies will do the right thing eventually, and they will raise the wages instead by their own incentives.
Which they never do, and only raise wages as a very last resort. They do instead coordinated wage suppression, lobbying governments to take away labor rights from the labor force, outsource their operations, set up new offshore offices to escape paying taxes, etc
So what does your comment to do with that? I think your message doesn't address any of that
Thus if you lower taxes, economics growth increases (overall tax receipts go up, not down).
The Laffer curve simply shows the relationship between taxation and government revenue. It has nothing to do with the policies and the economic theories. In fact, there are two points on both sides of the Laffer curve's maxima where tax revenues are the same in theory. That's just a simple didactical tool, nothing more.
Saying that the Laffer curve is the trickle down economics is as bad as saying that visualizations of a binary tree are what we call algorithms and data structures.
The Reagan administration argued the US was the right side of the curve, and that lowering taxes would result in economic growth ("a rising tide raises all boats"). Economic growth benefits every worker.
What you are describing is if we are on the right side of the curve. But is there any evidence that this is true?
When I read Sowell, someone who I imagine would be a champion for this cause, he cites the 1920s as his evidence that trickle-down works which doesn’t inspire confidence. If there is no modern evidence, why are we even entertaining this theory today?