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"trickle down theory" seems obviously correct to me. Like, if a person has lots of money, it's stupid to sit on it - they invest it, found businesses, hire people, buy things - all of which are putting money back into lower tiers of the economy to me. Am I missing something big?

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You're missing that they are literally sitting on it about 80% of the time. Deep dive into the Panama Papers.

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But that just seems retarded to me. Sitting on money is so dumb I have trouble believing rich people with access to the best financial advisors would do that. Unless the tax burden is discouraging them from reinvesting into the economy?

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"Sitting" on money doesn't mean getting no return. High Frequency Trading adds no real liquidity to the market, doesn't substantively invest in companies operations, and makes shit tons of money. It's almost a lucrative private tax orchestrated against real investors.

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Ok this seems like a real answer, or at least I don't know enough about this. Do you have a link you recommend to learn more?

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There are a bunch of books about what happened at Enron that are a pretty good reference about making money by "appearing" to have a business and just moving things around. Enron only collapsed because they overreached, and crossed some stupid lines.

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Ok yeah but Enron seems like a different thing? Like the issues there don't seem inherent to having a lot of wealth

12:13 AM · Dec 28, 2019

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The mechanisms of Enron making paper money without doing any useful service are informative. They make a strong analogy for any more recent 'investments' that the very wealthy use their tax handouts for.

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I definitely agree with the enron example as an extreme example. They did pretty much every type of manipulation they could. I don't think most companies do that much, but I think that most companies do some. I do recommend the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room"

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The replies to this are so full of non-sequiturs. “Rich people will lose money to inflation if they don’t invest it.” “Oh yeah? Well Enron was a fraud.” Ok? And?

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This is just one example of many forms of rent seeking.