I don't come around here often so sorry for the late response.

The premise that 'rising waters raise all ships' is the general idea behind trickle down economics. It means when you cut taxes for companies and investors, they invest and spend more and as a result, everyone's lives improve. When you punish them, they spend less and those at the bottom of the distribution suffer the most. This is true and has been demonstrated since the 1980s in the following ways :

Avg Home Size by Decade
[www.newser.com]

Also...
[www.heritage.org]

Some highlights :

* 38 percent of the persons whom the Census Bureau identifies as "poor" own their own homes with a median value of $39,200.

* 62 percent of "poor" households own a car; 14 percent own two or more cars.

* Nearly half of all "poor" households have air-conditioning; 31 percent have microwave ovens.

* Nationwide, some 22,000 "poor" households have heated swimming pools or Jacuzzis.



So - has the 'rising waters raised all ships'? Have people's lives improved since the 'Reaganomics' of the 1980s? Absolutely.

One other glaring thing is that - when economists talk about capital spending from the top distributing wealth to the bottom - they're not restricting their premise to within the USA. In fact, the majority of "working class" who have received the most direct money has been basically everywhere besides the USA. See this : [ourworldindata.org]

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Clearly it "works" in the sense that does what it claims - but whether you think it "worked" or not will depend on what YOUR expectations are.

Did you expect a tax cut to usher in the utopia? Did you expect globalization to guarantee an elimination of American poverty? Did you expect it to create single payer health care? I don't know, I don't know what you expected it to do but it definitely did do what it was meant to do which was raise our GDP and raise people's standards of living.


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Regarding Kansas.

The Republicans in Kansas assumed that the thing holding people out of their state was their already "bottom 20% in the country" taxes. That was dumb. It's a dumb idea to think that if cutting *some* taxes is beneficial then *cutting all the taxes* will be exponentially so. When they cut all the business taxes to zero, it made sense for people to become 1099 contractors (ie, self exployed) because then they paid *NO taxes*.

There is absolutely a "sweet spot" where you're lower than your competition, you have attracted talent to your area, your schools are not falling apart and a small incentive to invest will reap rewards.

If you go below this sweet spot, all your doing is taking money out of the tax coffers and you'll know if you're doing it right by measuring the tax coffers themselves. If they drop instead of go up, you did it wrong.

FWIW, I don't believe in 'never ending Reaganomics'. Just because a tax cut is beneficial and aids the economy doesn't mean it's a never ending party every time you cut. There are diminishing returns. If Trump came out and said he wanted to cut another 10% I'd be against it, for instance. We're in a good spot where we're actually making more tax revenue than we were before and that's how you know it was a successful cut.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2019 12:15PM by Death_Claw.