<[email protected]> wrote: > Dear PEN-Lers and Marxists (of which I am one), > > 1) Who wrote the best critique of "trickle down" ideology? I want to take > on "tax cuts for the rich" in a spectacular way. Please help.
Maybe it was Marx on the first question. His general idea was that rich folks have enough income, wealth, and power that they can afford to accumulate more wealth and power, which of course gives them more income which they can use to accumulate with. Most of us are just scraping by -- or if we have wealth, it's "life cycle" wealth that helps us survive retirement and thus won't last much past our demise. There's little room for any kind of dynasty-building. It's not accumulation of wealth and power. Note that the rich accumulate more than just financial wealth: they also gain "social wealth" (well-placed connections) and political power and influence. Anyway, if you give them more income -- in the form of a tax cut, for example -- it doesn't motivate them to work any more (except to lobby for more of such cuts, of course). It gives them more income with which to save (i.e., to do financial investment) but it simply makes them richer. As Keynes pointed out, saving doesn't automatically produce real (tangible) investment; over-production may occur instead. Of course, any tangible investment that results is most likely to be done where wages and environmental rules are the laxest. I guess the "trickle down effect" works when the rich hire servants. But as soon as those servants want higher wages or get uppity, they'll be fired, perhaps replaced by immigrants. > 2) Also, theory of money. Please tell me why simply printing billions of > dollars and giving it away to the working classes (say, $100,000 per family) > would or wouldn't work. In recent years, the Fed has printed up a lot of money and has given it to the banks and other financial institutions, in return for financial assets, many of them toxic or worthless. It hasn't worked to simulate demand enough to get the economy out of stagnation. Banks don't want to lend to anyone these days and are thus holding onto reserves. Maybe if the Fed gave money to the working class instead ... it would work, since working people would spend it, which would help demand a lot. But this technique wouldn't work once we get to full employment (as conventionally defined), since it would simply cause inflation. That might be a good thing (up to a point) because in real terms it would get rid of a lot of workers' debt. -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
