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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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Sounded feasible but we can say with complete certainty that it is incorrect, because we can look back at all the years since this theory was first implemented (early Reagan era I think) and see that in fact the money never trickled down.

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How do you tell if it did or didn't? Like, standard of living went up and poverty levels decreased, does that count as a sign of it working or no

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I think you have to look at the wealth and see if it ultimately redistributed among lower classes. Since the 80s the opposite has happened. The 1%’s share of total wealth has increased since then and continues to while <1% has an ever decreasing piece of the pie.

Aella

@Aella_Girl

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@jbtiv

I guess I didn't think about 'redistribution' as being the goal, I thought of it as simply 'benefitting the lower class.' Reducing the wealth gap seems like weird goal to me - why do you care about how better the top people have it as long as your own experience is getting better

7:26 PM · Dec 28, 2019

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Not the goal per se. So the problem is that with that inequality lots of people’s lives have not gotten better. There’s more debt, it’s more difficult to buy a home, wage growth hasn’t tracked with inflation, education and healthcare are much more expensive.

@jbtiv

Dec 28, 2019

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@Aella_Girl

So if income inequality existed in a vacuum it would not matter. I think most would agree if everyone was doing SO much better that most people had retirement, home ownership, savings, and a stable job that covered this and their basic needs, we wouldn’t sweat the ultrarich much.