"Bottom Up" vs. "Trickle Down"

Americans have been transfixed by the nation's fiscal crisis this past week. Bank failures, government bailouts and a major restructuring of Wall Street finally pulled press attention off of trivialities. Sen. McCain is finally waking up and discovering an important issue that working Americans have been worried about for a long time: the state of our economy.

The hard-working Americans I represent as president of the American Federation of Teachers can tell you that here on Main Street, for years now, we've been feeling the negative effects of an economy that concentrates wealth at the top. It didn't take a bank president losing his "golden parachute" to make us, or Sen. Obama, wake up to the trouble we are in. Obama's been talking about the kitchen table issues that matter to our disappearing middle class for the past two years on the campaign trail. And that's why our members are working hard to make sure that he is our next president.

Obama understands that the growing divide between rich and poor and the hollowing out of the middle class are damaging our nation's economic health, its schools and its communities. John McCain was content to keep growing the divide.

Obama understands that a nation with spiraling healthcare costs, flat wage growth and underfunded schools can't rise to the 21st-century challenges we face. McCain wanted to put our healthcare, Social Security and schools out on the "open market" to see how they would fare, assuring us that, as with the banking system, the rewards would soon flow in.

We know better. Obama knows better. That's why the AFT and our members are working day and night to elect him president of the United States. He is devoted to changing the disastrous course we are on in this country, and he understands that stability and opportunity for working families lie at the heart of what makes America great. And unlike McCain, it didn't just occur to Obama only last week that something was wrong.

In New York City, we made an investment in our teachers, and our whole city continues to reap the benefits. Now, imagine what could be accomplished if we made that investment in American workers across the country. We could truly fix our economy, from the bottom up.

We tried it the other way. We cut taxes on rich people. We waited for it to "trickle down." We let the "market" decide. Guess what? The market failed.

It's time to rebuild this economy from the ground up. It's time to give the American workers a seat at the table. It's time for new leadership. It's time for Barack Obama.

Comments

[research]

Exactly!

Let's help the individual home owners.

Cap mortgage interest rates at say 7%.

Repeal the 2005 Draconian Bankruptcy bill.

Claw back Executive pay for bankrupting companies.

Remove the Social security income cap.

Double the top marginal rate from it's current 100 year record low of 22% to 44%.

http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=19

End the Fed.

Lend directly to Citizens of the USA at that sweet 2% rate.

[research]

My tax rate numbers are off, sorry, The 22% is the top rate rich folks actually pay. not the marginal rate.

Check out the Borrow and spend GOP:

http://www.intelligentguess.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/usa-historical-debt-as-a-of-gdp-from-1929-w2.jpg

[zanzig]

A question asked just today by one of our leading columnists in Australia is: if funds in the region of $700b has been lost, where has it gone? Has someone, or several someones, become richer by this amount? If all of this is just smoke and mirrors and paper losses, why is the American taxpayer exchanging real money for the smoke and mirrors? The $2.5b taken from London Lehman's account which would have paid the ordinary salaries and wages of data processing operators, receptionists, call center staff and analysts, has instead been taken to pay "bonuses" to the NYC traders who are apparently essential to continued business. I think you Americans need to ask a lot more questions about exactly who is going to receive pyments out of the $700b, if this is the precedent being set. Teachers, nurses, police officers and ordinary workers are highly unlikely to see a red cent of this trickle down.

[ReasonIsMyReligion]

When the uber-rich drink champagne, that trickledown on your leg ain't summer rain.

[Omidal]

Remember
Remember
and Remember

We as a nation must deploy all our resources to get him elected and protect future president Obama and family.
We lost two Kennedy, a Martin Luther King, and one Lincoln. All great orators and leaders.
We should not lose Obama under any circumstance.
We know there is a lot of people who hate him and want to do him harm.

To reduce wealth disparity and renew our hope we need to that beacon of light to keep shinning on all our us.

As he said, " it will not be easy"

He knows.

Great leaders can glimpse to the future and I think Obama can see it, too.
He does not have to say everything for us to undertand.
Jesus always said things that his disciples had to decipher.

And when they could not they asked him what he meant.

We need wise leaders. Our forefathers knew this as well.

[USexpat]

Reagan's "trickle down" turned out to be "dumped on" for the middle class.

The real victory for the real GOP base (the top 1% of earners in the US) was convincing so many middle class voters to feel the pain of the rich and support the Reagan/Bush/Bush tax cuts. This mass madness has continued until today, and support for the biggest redisribution of wealth in the history of the world continues unabated among middle class GOP voters.

I fully expect the rich to fight for their own interests. What amazes me is that so many others are willing to forego their own economic interests for the welfare of the wealthy.

[Javalation]

The bail-out is a short term tactic, most likely destined to fail. What comes next if this $700 billion doesn't do the job, another trillion? I would rather the strategy of putting the money into backing the FDIC and let the bank failures commence. Let the banks that made these bad choices fail along with the borrowers who borrowed beyond their means to repay. Don't let the system fail and destroy everyone.

The best thing about McCain grandstanding is that he may just kill the bailout, even though that wasn't his intent. Regardless of who is prez, this problem is just getting started and its gonna get worse. Smart people will cut spending, save cash & gold and get ready to hunker down. This is it!

[ElBruce]

Supply side economics is precisely the way from how economies work. Manipulating supply (ex: tax cuts to the rich to increase the supply of investment capital) just inflates already-saturated markets (there are still only so many real-estate properties). Dumping tons of extra capital in a market doesn't create new jobs, it just overvalues the assets of that market.

Conservatives love to talk about the invisible hand, but apparently they don't seem to understand what it does: match supply to demand. Wherever there's demand, free markets will create the supply themselves.

Therefore, the only way to get a different outcome out of a market is to change the demand side of the equation. Help people pay their mortgages, and the value of any securities based on them will go up. Those mortgage payments will go to the holders, giving them necessary liquidity. And the homeowners will be able to continue paying for the long term.

Seriously, it's like the conservatives are trying to sell themselves as math geniuses and then tell us that 2+2=5.

[justsomeguywhocameby]

I for one am tired of being tricked down on.

[wwsword]

Please, Obama is corporate backed money shaped. He went for the bailout before the Republicans did. Ideology is the antidote for reason, my poison.

[oafishcad]

We should be building infrastructure, bridges, levees, railroads, mass transit, investing in R&D, letting senior retire earlier rather than later, building alternative energy, finding green industries, etc. INSTEAD of a bailout. People whose homes are being foreclosed could get better jobs and NOT be foreclosed. Instead we get President Titanic running round in circles screaming "Weapons of Mass Economic Destruction" and the Democrats believing him, yet again. I learned a long time ago, if Bush says it, it isn't true. The GOP gets to reject his ideas, and keep a Democratic majority come election time from happening. Brilliant move on the part of the GOP. A perfect way to distance themselves from Bush and their own responsibility in the economic mess. Brilliant.