The theory of “trickle down economics,” which holds that greater wealth at the top generates jobs and income for the masses below, drew some of Obama’s harshest criticism.
“It’s a simple theory — one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work,” Obama said of supply-side economics, drawing extended applause. “It’s never worked.”
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Baud
You’re going to see a lot more of this. The election is still a year away. It’s only going to get more delicious as we get closer.
Hunter Gathers
Well, he just lost Bobo’s vote with his angry, hyper-partisan tone. I look forward to many columns extolling the virtue of forced child labor.
BGinCHI
That is just fucking awesome.
Compare that to “fire union janitors and replace them with their 12-year-old kid and watch the economy grow!”
I bet a bunch of
stenographersreporters heard that and had to ask each other “Hey Jake, what was that supply side whatsit?”Hill Dweller
If he can couple this economic message with the Republicans’ unprecedented level of obstructionism during a catastrophic economic collapse, it will serve him well.
Villago Delenda Est
The most pernicious lie, the most terrible myth, even worse than the invisible sky buddy myth, is the myth of “rugged individualism”. It’s an outright lie. Once the French trappers were gone, it was all over for that. The entire “winning of the West” was done with MASSIVE government subsidies of all types. All those “rugged indivudal” ranchers would be lost without freebie grazing and water rights. There would be no rice farming in the Imperial Valley without massive government subsidy. Forget about Arizona…
techno
What a surprise to discover that a rising yacht really does NOT lift all tides.
JKG also had this foolishness nailed down.
BGinCHI
@Villago Delenda Est: But the Destiny, it was Manifest!
Benjamin Franklin
I’ve always loved this expression because it focuses on the idiocy of Reagan Democrats who want to believe Republican mictoration is rain falling from Heaven.
Has there been anything in the last 30 years proven less credible than Reaganomic Voodoo Supply-sideism?
Rant…off
carpeduum
Fox Business News declares war on the Muppets for brainwashing kids with their anti-corporate agenda!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl6ekkvWnOE
First they came for SpongeBob SquarePants and I did nothing….
General Stuck
Why should this be a surprise of who Obama really is at the core.
The dude was president of Harvard Review, and could have made a gazzilion dollars anywhere he wanted, but saddled up to beat the mean streets of urban Chicago for a pittance.
He had to treat the economy wholistically as president, the supply side as well as pushing for more demand, against a senate that has been entrenched in supply side policy for 3 decades. To bring an economy back from the brink. But is anything but a corporatist at heart. Disagree with individual policies as you wish, but I hope this question of where Obama stands personally on economic matters, is settled once and for all, but I know it won’t be.
Calouste
@Villago Delenda Est:
Not to mention that all those rugged individual farmers would have had some problems if Custer et al. hadn’t been around to massacre the Native Americans.
Smiling Mortician
Well, sure there was thunderous applause. He was speaking in the lefty mecca of . . . um . . . Kansas? Really? That’s kind of awesome.
MikeJ
@Villago Delenda Est:
And don’t forget that Oklahoma is so proud of being founded by illegal immigrants they named their college football team for them.
rikyrah
ot- nothing from Sully about his hero Huntsman flip-flopping on climate change?
Southern Beale
Well here’s some news that sucks. One of my best friends works at a local magazine and hires me for a bunch of freelance work .. and she just got laid off today, in fact her whole department was laid off. The magazine decided to have a content factory provide all of their content. So needless to say, all of my freelance work is gone from this outlet, too.
God I really really really really hate content factories. The work is so subpar.
beltane
@Villago Delenda Est: Don’t forget the Homestead Act, possibly the largest government land redistribution plan in human history. The winning of the west for the white man was entirely nurtured by the ample teats of the US government.
El Cid
@General Stuck: It really is something when the electoral choice is between a guy who really has worked fairly hard and seems to really give a shit about ordinary people — within whatever matrix of rule people become accustomed — and a collection of nasty, venomous pre-mammals.
AA+ Bonds
Always makes me think of a quote from Hocus Pocus (one of Vonnegut’s lesser works by his estimation, a point on which he and I disagreed strongly):
carpeduum
@Southern Beale: wtf is a content factory? A bunch of chinese cutting and pasting stories together?
AnotherBruce
@techno: What a surprise to discover that a rising yacht really does NOT lift all tides.
This is brilliant. I will point out that the tide rises from the bottom.
Jenny
Rachel is replaying the speech and just had a multiple orgasm.
jibeaux
@Southern Beale:
That truly sucks. I’d like to suggest writing the next hot dystopian young adult novel featuring “content factories”. I don’t even know what they are, but they sound evil. Factories are for widgets.
arguingwithsignposts
@carpeduum: Associated Content, Demand Media and the like who churn out web stories based on keywords and pay producers a pittance based on the number of hits the stories receive.
S. cerevisiae
Only in America can you make a big Broadway hit musical about stealing land. (OK)
Holden Pattern
I wonder what exactly about money trickling down from the top reflects our “rugged individualism”*. That model seems to be far more about feudalism to me.
*TM Republican Party. This offer not valid in all historical timelines, most particularly not your historical timeline.
General Stuck
@El Cid:
true
Southern Beale
@carpeduum:
Those places like Demand Studios. Pay crap — $10 a story. That’s not a joke, either. That is literally what they pay — if that. They want 400 words. And they want, like, 5 of them an hour. There’s no way any writer can do that and not just be making shit up. You can’t shit out your content.
They advertise in Craigslist all of the time. Here’s a post I did on them last year. It’s why so much journalism sucks these days. A lot of magazines are outsourcing their content to these people.
RedKitten
Good for Obama for saying that. It’s about bloody time someone did.
You know what else trickles down? Piss. And that’s about all that trickle-down economics amounts to.
Southern Beale
Here’s a Craigslist ad where they want to pay $18 for a 750-1000 word article.
I have two words for people who think so little of writers that this is what they’d offer. Fuck and You.
Duff Clarity
This is the Democratic equivalent of the Republican election year dog whistles about social issues.
Republican politicians don’t care about abortion or immigration or defending traditional families. They care about protecting the interests of large corporations and making sure that the richest people keep getting richer.
They only resort to the other stuff during election year when they need a few votes. They talk about it, then do nothing about it.
Democratic politicians don’t care about inequality. They care about protecting the interests of large corporations and making sure that the richest people keep getting richer.
They only resort to the other stuff during election year when they need a few votes. They talk about it, then do nothing about it.
And you, you ridiculous people, you cheer, “More of this!”.
The Obama administration was given a perfect storm of a chance to do something about the concentration of wealth in this country. A huge percentage of that concentration of wealth is due to the financial sector. When is there ever going to be a better chance to do something about the concentration of wealth in the financial sector then there was in 2009?
Never.
What did Obama do? Make sure that the wealthy didn’t lose any of their wealth, that no matter how bad they fucked up, they didn’t pay one cent for their mistakes.
Now he needs your votes, so he farts in your general direction and you think it smells like victory.
To me it just smells like the same old shit.
RedKitten
@Southern Beale: That’s obscene! To churn out that many words and come together with something that’s halfway decent, especially if sources are involved? That would take a few days, if I had to guess. And they think that three days worth of work is worth $18? Yeah. Fuck them with a rusty pitchfork.
arguingwithsignposts
@RedKitten: It’s even more obscene if you consider what David Brooks or Megan McArdle get paid for their source-free articles.
RedKitten
@arguingwithsignposts: Especially when you consider that the stuff in my kid’s diaper holds more intellectual merit than their writings.
kay
Good. I’ll have to watch the speech.
I don’t remember what Obama looks like. Newt Gingrich’s giant, jowly face is everywhere I look.
It’s not fair that I have to see him all the time again.
NickM
@Southern Beale: Those folks need a union!
DanielX
Every time I hear (or ever have heard) that phrase “trickle down economics”, another phrase flashes into my mind: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.
AT
I’ll tell you what does trickle down, Santorum!
RSA
@Southern Beale: From that Craigslist ad:
Wow. Work full time doing what’s generally considered a creative job and get paid comfortably more than half the federal minimum wage.
Benjamin Franklin
” Newt Gingrich’s giant, jowly face is everywhere I look.
It’s not fair that I have to see him all the time again.”
lol. You can’t have Falstaff, and have him thin…
jl
@Villago Delenda Est: I would say, not even the French trappers. It was international joint stock companies and royal monopolies that made the international trade possible. The traders did not get them beads, pipes and whatnot trade goods locally made from frontier outposts out in the boondocks.
Political contests between interest groups, big finance (relative to the economy at the time), and resulting speculation (in land, etc) had a huge influence in many, maybe most, people’s success and failure in North America long before US independence, and long before our current Constitution.
Omnes Omnibus
@Benjamin Franklin: Newt is no Falstaff.
Spaghetti Lee
@AT:
No, santorum oozes. It’s not liquid enough to trickle. Again, you lie-bruls just can’t get the facts straight.
Spaghetti Lee
@Omnes Omnibus:
“Banish plump Newt, and banish all the world!”
“…Actually, I’m willing to agree to that.”
kay
Benjamin Franklin, wasn’t once around enough for us w/ Gingrich?
I’m getting ready to read his ethics inquiry report.
It’s captioned: “In the Matter of Speaker Gingrich”
Omnes Omnibus
@Spaghetti Lee:
As it turns out, this is information that I did not need.
RedKitten
@RSA: You think a writer can churn out a decent article of that length in an hour? Seriously?
Benjamin Franklin
@kay:
Newton is a gift from the Gods. Savor the flavor…
arguingwithsignposts
@RedKitten: The other kicker being that people on the Internet generally read 750 words. It is to laugh.
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: TL;DR.
AA+ Bonds
@RedKitten:
If you spent three entire days on an article for them they’d never call you back again
AA+ Bonds
Speaking of Vonnegut, it’s pretty sad that his advice to young writers (bang out copy and make some money while you work on your art) will now get them nowhere and nothing and leave them no free time to write anything else.
Thankfully his other big piece of advice was “do something other than writing with your life for a while”, which will serve them well, as long as they don’t actually plan on writing at any point
Mnemosyne
@RedKitten:
I think you missed the sarcasm.
S. cerevisiae
@carpeduum: OFFS! They are pissed about a Muppet named Tex Richman who is an oil baron? Have they watched some of the old Looney Tunes? That stuff was totally liberal and subversive. I still remember the Texas oil baron who had a car with its own switchboard who was trying to steal Bugs Bunny’s home. You want to make your kids liberal critical thinkers? Feed them Looney Tunes and old Mad magazine.
arguingwithsignposts
@RedKitten:
also, too – as i mentioned: David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, etc. (also, Rush Limbaugh on radio) seem to do it often. Now when you use the word “decent,” then we get into issues.
AA+ Bonds
I might have kept writing myself, but you know what Sam Johnson said and We Are All Blockheads Now
Michael
@RedKitten:
I don’t think that’s what he was saying…I read it as the fact that a full-time minimum wage earner makes ~$290 a week. The article asks for a “full time writer” to churn out 10 articles a week, at $18 per, so $180 a week for a “full-time writer”, or more than half of what a full-time minimum wage worker gets.
Which is to say, that ad is fucking ridiculous. Which is what I think he was trying to get at…
RedKitten
@Mnemosyne: I did. I’m tired. And I didn’t read the rest of the bit about expecting 10 articles a week.
My bad.
10 articles a week? Holy fuck. I hope they don’t expect much research or sourcing to be done on those. (I only used three days as a guideline, because when I wrote an article on climate change and salt marsh restoration for my company’s magazine, it was about the same length, and it took me about three days just to do the writing — that’s not counting the research, and sourcing out the quotes.)
Omnes Omnibus
@RedKitten: Yeah, but I bet you tried to do a good job. That’s where you went wrong.
RedKitten
@Omnes Omnibus: Likely.
LiberalTarian
Well, if you are into Golden Showers the Trickle Down theory works great. Also known as the 1%.
Not so much the 99% of people who prefer to not be peed on.
JCT
@Spaghetti Lee: OK, I laughed. Savage is my hero forever for what he did to that asshole.
And my late father, the world’s biggest liberal always referred to “Trickle Down” economics as “Trickled On” economics. And this was 20 years ago.
RSA
@RedKitten:
You may have missed the sarcasm in my comment. (I regularly used to write 1,000 word articles in a few hours–but I had to give it up, because doing that once a month was too demanding. :-)
suzanne
@Spaghetti Lee:
Wow. I’ll take “Things I Was Happy Not Thinking About” for $500, Alex.
I don’t know what y’all are whining about. I can come up with a thousand words in a couple of hours. Of course, the vast, VAST majority of them would be “and” and “the” and “fuck”, because I am mature.
Sasha
@Smiling Mortician:
A call back to Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech, made over a century ago in the same city.
Joe Buck
I’m glad to see Obama talking this way. I wish he had started much earlier (e.g. before the 2010 election, when Dems could still get something passed) but better late than never.
Unsympathetic
It’s interesting to hear Obama speechifying like this.
Still waiting for him to figure out that those words require specific actions by DoJ – or he’s just another talking head.
Palli
trickle down poster from Alaska
http://www.politicalgraphics.org/home.html
DPirate
Whisper me more sweet nothings, my darling president.
OzoneR
@Southern Beale: Stories about what? anything?
WereBear
@Southern Beale: This explains why magazines are dying off, no? Because you can find badly written crap on the Internet for free.
BruinKid
@S. cerevisiae: Or my favorite growing up, Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers. I mean, their main villain was literally Fat Cat!
jprfrog
@S. cerevisiae: Foghorn Leghorn has been reborn as Mitch McConnell.
Catsy
@Duff Clarity: I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear what you were trying to say over the sound of your vigorous ratfucking.
Ken
@Villago Delenda Est: There would be no rice farming in the Imperial Valley without massive government subsidy.
The history of the Imperial Valley is instructive. Private enterprise got the idea of irrigating the Salton Desert, and accidentally created the Salton Sea when their cheap headgates broke down and the Colorado River turned north. It took the government ordering the Southern Pacific to dump rock into the channel to get the river back into its former bed. Otherwise the Sink would have filled and the Gulf would run north to Palm Springs.
Aet
I want SO MUCH MORE OF THIS. I want our president to address the public and continually hammer home the point that this ‘trickle-down’, don’t-tax-the-rich economic philosophy has never worked in the past 30 years.
I can endure the fact that he wants to continually try to negotiate with people who hate him, if he would just call a failed economic policy what it is.
Tone in DC
Oops upside the winguts’ heads.
And yes, words + actions even in dealing with the most do-nothing Congress in history, would be good.
singfoom
@Catsy: I don’t see any dirty tricks involved in Duff Clarity’s comment. Just because you disagree with someone’s viewpoint on the administration, that doesn’t make it “ratfucking”.
One can appreciate the tone of the speech, be a supporter of the administration in general, intend to vote for O in 2012 AND (GASP) also think that the administration has done a piss poor job on dealing with the financial crisis.
But hey, don’t let that idea get in the way of your attacking someone you disagree with or your confirmation bias.
That Guy
@singfoom: You’re right. It is absolutely alright for someone to outright lie and make up bullshit to discredit the President. People on this blog have no problem with that at all, and furthermore, should not ever have a problem with that.
This is sarcasm by the way.
Duff Clarity
There was nothing in my post that was a lie.
There was nothing in my post that was bullshit.
The President discredited himself. He did lie. There are things that he said he would do if he was elected, and then he was elected, and he didn’t do them. That is called lying.
And the President is making up bullshit now. He had a once in a century chance to do something about inequality.
And he did something about it, he made it worse.