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Big Pens Prepare Coming Political Assassinations
Townhall.com ^ | September 15, 2014 | Shawn Mitchell

Posted on 09/15/2014 7:38:41 AM PDT by Kaslin

We’re living a failing economy. Job hunters are so discouraged, tens of millions have dropped out. The world is erupting in flames. The terror threat to America is higher than any time since September 10, 2001. Democrats have no successes to point to, nothing positive to defend going into election season. Presidential approval is tanking. Obviously, America is ready for something different. Big government progressives are about to get spanked! Right? Not even close.

Look out, conservatives! With the help of ignorant or malicious national Big Pens and Big Hairs who wouldn’t know the benefits of Constitutional freedom if it bit them in the amicus, you’re about to get painted as the biggest racists, sexists, class-snob robber barons the world has ever known. We’re talking America before civil rights; matrimony before female inheritance and voting rights; class castes before Social Security and food stamps. You horrible non-liberals won’t rest until everyone who isn’t a rich, white, heterosexual, property owning male is hungry, uninsured, unemployed, and socially oppressed.

It’s an old but successful playbook. When Paul Ryan burst on the scene as the VP nominee, with creative ideas on the budget, fighting poverty, and sparking the economy that was dying under Obama, the president displayed his customary grace by accusing Republicans of peddling "trickle-down fairy dust." The media obligingly piled on with stories about Romney’s wealth and Ryan’s tiny nicks in the massive entitlement empire as if they were the end of economic progress.

They protected Progressive dogma and liberal economic fraud in the same way they protected Obama’s foreign policy frauds. The latter have burst into such a disastrous fireball, there’s barely public or media attention left for the former. Nevertheless, there’s domestic economic suffering aplenty.

To preview the coming election/policy debates, let’s consider one class warfare staple: “Trickle down economics.” Strictly speaking, that taunt has always been an incoherent mess.

People get wealthy by persuading consumers to buy their products and services. It’s actually trickle up economics. Goods and services flow to consumers; payment flows to suppliers. And, entrepreneurs usually hire and benefit a lot of workers along the way.

“Trickle down economics”--what does it mean? That if we don't tax the snot out of the rich, maybe they'll pour some spare pennies down on the heads of the poor? Nonsense. Beyond achieving a miserly-sounding sneer, the pairing is exactly wrong in at least three different ways.

First, the wealthy don’t actually trickle anything down on anyone. They pay for things they need and want, with whatever effects that produces in the economy. What progressives seem to prefer is a system to wring the rich like a wet towel and politically drizzle the money on the needy—what’s left, anyway, after government waters its favored causes and cronies.

That's the approach of the shake-down state economies of the Euro-moribund zone and of the great Peron-Castro-Chavez banana republic tradition. You know, where strongmen gain power, neutralize competing power centers--like checks and balances—assert economic control, and chocan the fortunes and freedom of rising Latin nations. (“Chocar” doesn’t mean “to choke” but close enough).

That turns out to be the real “trickle down”: extract lots of money from the rich, feed it through the digestive tract of government and its many corrupt parasites, then dribble what’s left on the heads of the grateful, dependent poor, thus securing their suicidal votes.

It’s ruined a number of nations and threatens to ruin America.

Come to think, “trickle down economics” also reasonably describes the redistributive obsession and promises President Obama has powerfully and empirically debunked in an exhaustive six year field study. Jobs down. Dependency way up. Inequality up. Bravo, Mr. President! Thank you for historically vindicating the historically consequential Reaganism you hoped to erase from the textbooks.

Second, what liberals call “trickle down” is just good ole’ “supply side" or “free market” economics. It means human freedom in commercial activity. Get out of the way of people’s pursuit of happiness and gainful labor, so free exchange and economic growth can build prosperity. Investors, entrepreneurs, managers, and workers build enterprises that hire employees to market goods and services to willing buyers. Prosperity and opportunity spread out from there.

Third, interestingly, if any vertical metaphor makes sense here, it’s not “down,” but “up.” “Trickle up economics” describes free enterprise far better than “trickle down.” The way to build wealth in a free economy is to satisfy the market, as in consumers. That is, to get rich you have to offer goods or services for which A) people are willing to pay you; B) a price higher than your cost of providing; and C) in sufficient quantity that profits proliferate. And your offer has to be more attractive than your other competitors’.

If people get wealthy in a free economy, it's because the wealth trickles up as a result of others’ free choices pursuing their own benefit. All the related suppliers, employees, contractors and others also gain from the same flowing currents of wealth generation. Apart from charitable giving--a different subject--the rich don’t pour or trickle anything down on less fortunate heads; rather the middle and working classes earn income in the streams that trickle up toward success.

Ever since this silly insult first trickled harmlessly off Ronald Reagan’s Teflon, its logic has been amiss. But it is all the liberal establishment has left.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 09/15/2014 7:38:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
All righty, then.
2 posted on 09/15/2014 7:41:37 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum ("The man who damns money obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it earned it." --Ayn Rand)
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To: Kaslin

Call the Democrat economics “Shakedown Economics”.


3 posted on 09/15/2014 7:47:20 AM PDT by rockinqsranch ((Dems, Libs, Socialists, call 'em what you will. They ALL have fairies livin' in their trees.))
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To: Kaslin
Do any of the old economic arguments regarding the American economy still apply given globalization of technology and trade? America has not seen anything resembling a free market since the 1920’s and our monopoly on technology disappeared in the 1990’s. The American middle class benefits niether from trickle up or down policies in today's environment. We are facing a level economic playing field with the rest of the world.
4 posted on 09/15/2014 7:50:23 AM PDT by buckalfa (Long time caller --- first time listener.)
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To: Kaslin

Liberals have beaten themselves down to the point that they
can’t debate. They don’t have a leg to stand on. After 6 years
they don’t have one positive success to point to. All they
can do now is go straight to name calling and false
accusations. The only thing propping them up is the state
controlled media and their refusal to report the truth
about anything.

Anyone who still supports this regime is
either an idiot or an American hating communist.


5 posted on 09/15/2014 7:52:20 AM PDT by Slambat (q)
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To: Slambat

Unfortunately there are critical masses of low information voters, liberals, and communist sympathizing radical types.

To listen to the media you would swear that there is a war on women, that conservatives want to take away birth control because they want girls to be barefoot and pregnant.

From what we hear, you would swear that young black men, just walking down the street minding their own business, are shot by racist white cops for no reason. This a war on black men, America is racist, etc.etc.

And of course the GOP wants to throw granny off the cliff, and wants to cut back all manner of social programs because the GOP is actually in favor of doing away with all social programs and all anti poverty programs.

And so it goes.


6 posted on 09/15/2014 8:03:47 AM PDT by Dilbert San Diego (s)
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To: Kaslin

Thought this thread was about some of the goons whom the
Pittsburgh Penguins signed during the offseason.


7 posted on 09/15/2014 8:18:15 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Slambat

They also don’t want to debate


8 posted on 09/15/2014 8:23:59 AM PDT by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
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To: Kaslin

Those who believe in nothing and crave only their next freebie are most influenced by Democrat deceit.


9 posted on 09/15/2014 9:09:36 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell (This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
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To: Slambat

“Anyone who still supports this regime is either an idiot or an American hating communist.”

Look around you. There are lots of hardcore
Progressive-loving voters out there and they’re going to go for Progressives again because everything that is
happening now, according to them, is Ronald Reagan’s fault and all those ingnorant, knuckcle-dragging, gun-loving, bible-thumping Christian morons out there who voted for him. (As usual, Mr. Bush is also on the blame list.)

IMHO

IMHO


10 posted on 09/15/2014 9:51:24 AM PDT by ripley
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To: Kaslin
The GOPe should respond to the tired old 'trickle down economics' of the private sector canard with the charge of 'trickle down government' that typifies the democrat party policy.

What would you rather have - a decent job or food stamps?

I realize there are some voters who'll take the stamps but I cannot believe that a plurality wouldn't rather have the job.

11 posted on 09/15/2014 12:19:33 PM PDT by skeeter
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