Trickle-Up Economics

By Kevin J. Curtis

Once upon a time, workers united and through collective bargaining, they were able to get a fair wage and benefits for their labor. Over the years when the economy was good, workers often got a cost-of-living raise each year. Over time, leaders such as Ronald Reagan decided that the best way to have an economy, was to ensure that the rich people became really rich, so that everyone else would live off of the "trickle-down" from the rich. Essentially, if the wealthy and powerful had an excess, it was argued that some of it would eventually get down to the less fortunate who did all of the work.

Somewhere along the line, the government was being manipulated by the leaders who generally came from the ranks of the wealthy. These people used the workers to pay taxes to support things like wars to ensure that oil corporations had oil to sell to the workers so that they could buy cars from other wealthy corporations and drive to work to get the trickle-down to support their families. Eventually the greed of the wealthy and their banks and corporations ruined the economy, and the workers taxes were used to bailout the banks and corporations that were going broke from their own mismanagement. This allowed these corporate gangsters to pass their bad debt on to the workers. Since this kept the businesses alive, they raised their prices and the executives took home large bonuses--while the workers’ wages were cut or "frozen" to pay for it.

Along the way, the National Debt continued to rise at an alarming rate! So the Republican leadership began a campaign to lower workers wages in order to try to balance the budget. In the meantime, the government employees who tried to make sure the corrupt businesses didn't charge too much, lost their jobs and corporations like (for example) Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO's) took enormous profits that were supposed to be used to support healthcare for the people.

What the rich people didn't seem to know, or were unwilling to admit, was that after the workers were reduced to the poverty level, something else began to occur. Since there was no money left for the workers to pay taxes, or to pay the bailouts and support the greed of the wealthiest people, a sort of "trickle-up" situation occurred. It resembled building a house on stilts and then kicking the stilts out from under it one-by-one. Eventually the rich people who lived in the house up above, fell down too; where they were eaten by the hungry poor below.