WARREN: "Trickle Down NOTHING MORE Than Politics Helping Rich & Powerful Get Richer & More Powerful"
SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN
SPEECH AT THE AFL-CIO NATIONAL SUMMIT ON RAISING WAGES
REMARKS AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY
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Trickle-down was popular with big corporations and their lobbyists, but it never really made much sense. George Bush Sr. called it voodoo economics. He was right, and let’s call it out for what it is: Trickle-down was nothing more than the politics of helping the rich-and-powerful get richer and more powerful, and it cut the legs out from under America’s middle class.
Trickle-down policies are pretty simple. First, fire the cops—not the cops on Main Street, but the cops on Wall Street. Pretty much the whole Republican Party – and, if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats – talked about the evils of “big government” and called for deregulation. It sounded good, but it was really about tying the hands of regulators and turning loose big banks and giant international corporations to do whatever they wanted to do—turning them loose to rig the markets and reduce competition, to outsource more jobs, to load up on more risks and hide behind taxpayer guarantees, to sell more mortgages and credit cards that cheated people. In short, to do whatever juiced short term profits even if it came at the expense of working families.
Trickle down was also about cutting taxes for those at the top. Cut them when times are good, cut them when times are bad. And when that meant there was less money for road repairs, less money for medical research, and less money for schools and that our government would need to squeeze kids on student loans, then so be it. And look at the results: The top 10% got ALL the growth in income over the past 30 years—ALL of it—and the economy stopped working for everyone else.
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see page 3 of this political masterpiece (& read the rest, of course):
http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2015-1-7_AFL-CIO_Raising_Wages_Summit.pdf
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