Except when “we” preach it:
It’s better for the economy. When you buy local, a large percentage of the money stays in your community. The farmer can afford to have the local mechanic fix his truck, the mechanic can afford to hire a local accountant to do his taxes, and the accountant can afford dinner out at a local restaurant. The wait staff makes decent tips, and the restaurant can afford to buy more fresh, local food to serve. Money also trickles into the local infrastructure – improvements to the public park, funding for academic enrichment, and so on. Everyone wins.
By the way, I would really appreciate it if you could find me a good economics textbook or popular treatment (such as this or this) that actually uses the term “trickle down economics” in any way other than describing the term as it is used popularly. In other words, I attended 9 years of college and graduate school, and have taught for nearly a decade, and in all of that time I have never once encountered the term “trickle down economics” in any reading or at any seminar I have attended.
UPDATE: this just hit my inbox
OK, back to more important things…
Marcy from Skylight
I think “trickle down” goes back to the New Deal and FDR; I can picture him saying it, maybe in a documentary clip. It has been used to mischaracterize supply-side economics by liberals. George H. W. Bush called it Voodoo Economics, the Skull and Bones phrase for Trickle Down, which is the Princeton phrase of choice. The idea is to send tax money to crony plutocrats to stop buying French wine and to buy locally from serfs who toil happily. It is a win-win situation, since everybody has a healthy organic diet and makes a smaller carbon footprint.
Happy Independence Day!
This whole canard of “buying local” ignores the potential benefits of trade. Why produce something locally that can be purchased elsewhere for half the price?
[…] Agreed, I’ve never heard anyone promote this so-called plan: Trickle Down Economics is Silly […]
WC, the progressives are not talking about paying women the same as men for a similar job. (No two jobs are ever the same exactly.) That kind of employment discrimination, along with discriminating with promotion is illegal.
What the progressives want is a government-run system to price pay. They already do this for medicine with an intricate system that codes everything that happens when something is done by doctors and nurses under Medicare and Medicaid, and their dream is to unify everything with a single payer system. The goal is to be fairer, especially when it comes to overpaying MD’s and underpaying the staff who process the bills to send the bureaucracy. Since the rest of the developed world has socialized medicine, there will be nowhere for doctors to flee, and finally we will have control over their billing practices, which are by Marxist definition exploitative.
Having taken care of medicine, it is time to socialize the rest of the exploitative capitalists by coding everything else. This completes the “From each according to their abilities” part, and deciding the price of each coded task takes care of the “To each according to his needs” part. The sex discrimination part is solved with a universal PC speech code, e.g. — “flight attendant” for “stewardess” and “sex worker” for “ho”.
In this way, underpaid harpists get paid at 66% of what a Madison Avenue advertising sales executive, since they fall into the hard-working artist category. When playing or advertising on a federal highway, both get Davis-Bacon prevailing wage.
Whether this system ever makes anybody rich (defined as a married couple filing jointly making over $250,000 per year, or what two tenured Chicago middle school teachers get, whichever is greater) is left unclear. BUT, the top guy, the commissar, gets no more than 250 percent of what the median employee gets, even if he is a GS-15.
Hey, this works! It has worked before, dude!