An economic idea which states that decreasing marginal and capital gains tax rates - especially for corporations, investors and entrepreneurs - can stimulate production in the overall economy. According to trickle-down theory proponents, this stimulus leads to economic growth and wealth creation that benefits everyone, not just those who pay the lower tax rates.
President Reagan's economic policies, commonly referred to as "Reaganomics" or supply-side economics, were based on trickle-down theory. The idea is that with a lower tax burden and increased investment, business can produce (or supply) more, increasing employment and worker pay. Reagan initially slashed the top income-tax rate from 70% to 50%. Trickle-down policy’s detractors see the policy as tax cuts for the rich and don’t think the tax cuts benefit lower-income earners.
A contrasting theory, Keynesianism, is based on stimulating demand through government spending and other government interventions. An increase in government spending necessitates an increase in income-tax rates – the opposite of what trickle-down theory advocates. Trickle-down theory does not support government intervention in the economy.
According to the trickle-down theory, if tax rates are lower, people have an incentive to work more because they get to keep more of the income they earn. They then spend or invest that income, and either of these activities will improve everyone’s prosperity, not just the prosperity of those in the highest income brackets. What’s more, in the end, the government may actually collect more income tax despite the lower tax rates because of the additional work performed. The Laffer Curve shows how this relationship works. If the government taxes 0% of income or 100% of income, it takes in no money. In between these two extremes, tax revenues vary because different tax rates encourage people to work more or to take more leisure time.Conservatives want society, as a whole, to allow the rich to "keep more of their money." Riches are then supposed to trickle down to the rest of society. When it doesn't trickle down 1) the citizens are uneducated, 2) the citizens aren't properly trained, 3) technology is replacing workers, and/or 4) the citizens are just lazy.
Larry Summers recently addressed these falsities:
The core problem is that there aren't enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won't get the jobs. Unless you're doing things that have things that are effecting the demand for jobs, you're helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs. […]
Folks, wage inflation in the united states is 2%. It has not gone up in five years. There are not 3% of the economy where there's any evidence of hyper wage inflation of a kind that would go with worker shortages. The idea that you can just have better training and then there are all these jobs, all these places where there are shortages and we just need the train people is fundamentally an evasion. [...]
I am concerned that if we allow the idea to take hold, that all we need to do is there are all these jobs with skills and if we can just train people a bit, then they'll be able to get into them and the whole problem will go away. I think that is fundamentally an evasion of a profound social challenge.Timothy Taylor elaborates on the decline in on-the-job training:
Here's some evidence from the recently released 2015 Economic Report of the President, by the Council of Economic Advisers, showing a decline in employer-provided and on-the-job training in recent decades...
Looking at the overall pattern, a decline in employer-sponsored and on-the-job training suggest that workers who wish to keep building their skills are getting less support from their employers.
Here again we have more Republican beliefs shown to be nothing more than self-serving blather and bullshit.
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