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LOL. What a load of lies. American businesses had the power to change American behavior in the 1800s and 1900s. Did they do it? No. American businesses could

LOL. What a load of lies. American businesses had the power to change American behavior in the 1800s and 1900s. Did they do it? No. American businesses could have helped outlawed slavery in America. They could have forced the issue onto their politicians. Did they do it? No. Then in the 1900s, American businesses could have outlawed racism. They could have forced civil rights onto their politicians. Did they do it? No. And today. American businesses can force the end of police violence against minorities onto their politicians. Are they doing it? No. American businesses can ensure fair distribution of wages, and financial equality, and social equality to help their minority citizens. Are they doing it? No. Hence, give me some evidence that American businesses can actually do something useful at home first, before making them a pawn in this stupid game of geopolitics that the Washington elites are playing against a nation on the other side of the world, and forcing the rest of us to choose sides on. When, they themselves do nothing for us. My point is, the problems we have in America, has nothing to do with China. This is all home grown. We have within ourselves, the ability to make life better, fairer, and more equitable to all Americans. Instead, what does the politicians do? Nothing. Instead, they do everything to support the rich, and the elite. While the rest of us gets fleeced, are lied to, and gets hoodwinked. The biggest lie that they sold to us, is that Trickle Down Economics will work for everyone. That tax cuts for the wealthy will help drive business growth. Trickle Down Economics should instead be renamed to Trickle Up Economics. The problem is not China. The problem is our corrupt political and financial system.

arcticbull 6y ago
I guess the question this article asks is what, if anything has changed since the examples you cite.
spoiledtechie 6y ago
I sense your a pretty emotional person and are quite upset at your current economic decision. So lets start with your point. Trickle down economic does work in its truest form. It starts with a person who creates a business. This business makes money through the work it does. The owner gets paid more and decides they can create another business. A business larger with more employees. Overtime, the owner creates many more businesses and employs more. Providing its employees with cash, to spend at restaurants, on boats, on houses, on daycare and many other businesses that the employees like to spend money on. Therefore jump starting more business owners to spend more. This is trickle down economics and its working. I think the thing your upset about is the idea that these business owners, the wealthy are not creating and doing more. I disagree and the US economy would disagree. You simply might just be detached from the economy. So your quite upset about it.
- Unesco88 6y ago
  Sigh, the fact that garbage like this appears on hackernews is why I can't take US politics seriously. How about some actual research? https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_worth_and_financial_wealth.png https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor... https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Actual_estimated_ideal_wealth_distribution.gif https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Actual_...
- Renaud 6y ago
  It works as long as the value created in opening more businesses actually trickles down to creating more decently paid jobs. The fact that many people are forced to handle more than one job just to survive shows that part of this argument isn't working. These types of businesses are creating precarity, not wealth for the workers for them to pass on to others.
- BoiledCabbage 6y ago
  Trickle down does not work period. First of all your usage above is not trickle down. Someone opening a business is not trickle down economics. Trickle down economics is specifically the idea that tax-cuts for the wealthier and highest income earners is more effective for stimulating the economy that tax cuts for poorer and low income earners. And when this concept is studied it is shown to be clearly false. [1] Being against trickle down economics is not "hating businesses", nor being against entrepreneurship, or anything else it's sometimes accused of. Being against trickle down economics is simply promoting the fact that it was a failed theory. The most effective way to stimulate the economy is by giving it to the people with the least income. Whether you want to enact is as your govt policy is a separate question - but here we're simply discussing what is the most effective way to make the economy productive and it's putting it in the hands of lowest income people. The secondary and tertiary effects simply make it the most effective method. Separate from the paper linked above showing the effect of the impact of tax-cuts at different levels of income, there is also a pretty readily available intuition (not in the paper). When people who have little to no money receive tax cuts they spend it. They spend it on food, they spend it on transportation, they spend it in businesses. By spending it in businesses they increase demand which drives opportunities to open new businesses and and increase the labor pool which also drives more demand. When people with high incomes and high wealth receive tax cuts they frequently spent it in inflating valuations of existing assets. Ex real estate goes up and there is more rent seeking (no effect on economic production), stock prices go up (again marginal effect on economic production). Frequently the wealthy already had the money to open a business so a tax cut doesn't actually create as much opportunity to open a business as people imagine. And the market is already at saturation as there has been no increase in available income, so no increase in consumption. An additional dollar available do the poorest eventually makes it to the wealthy after moving through the entire economy via consumption production cycles. A dollar provided to the wealthiest doesn't. It frequently ends up adding a zero to an account, which banks then have to loan out finding more places to invest and you get things like Housing Bubbles, or Softbank, or any other of the many credit bubbles. And finally, quoting the paper's conclusion. > [T]he stimulative effects of income tax cuts are largely driven by tax cuts for the bottom 90% and that the empirical link between employment growth and tax changes for the top 10% is weak to negligible over a business cycle frequency. 1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21035.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w21035.pdf
perl4ever 6y ago
There are places where a "corrupt political and financial system" intersect with China. I was kind of startled to find out that Chinese companies listed in the US are not held to the same standards as those from the US and other countries,[1] because the Chinese government will not allow auditing in the same way. It seems this is a genuine issue and not about xenophobia, even if it gets muddled with it by people who just don't like China. And it is corruption. Threatening to move listings out of the US, while of course it is an option, does not seem (or should not be) relevant to the US changing policies which have been corrupted due to Chinese demands based on "national security". It's about the US fixing its problems, not China per se. It's easy for a casual observer to see the Trump administration saying something and dismiss it, especially as their credibility is so low many news articles are automatically slanted. However, the SEC and PCAOB have some credibility to me. [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-china-exchanges/u-s-must-have-access-to-u-s-listed-chinese-firms-audit-documents-lawmakers-say-idUSKCN1T7060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-china-exchan...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > It's easy for a casual observer to see the Trump administration saying something and dismiss it, especially as their credibility is so low Sure, if you don't know any better. But when you look at the actual facts, Trump often has a more rational and successful approach than his opponents: - stopping travel from China on Jan. 31 due to corona - stopping the absurd postal discount - tariffs on Chinese imports to counter Chinese dumping - stopping Huawei from undermining the world's communications networks Trump doesn't seem so crazy now, does he? Regarding corona, we have an agency that was supposed to be on top of that - the CDC. About all I hear from them is a press interview every 2 months. I hope the next one includes a firing squad for the top 10 CDC officials.
thoughtstheseus 6y ago
Also concerning is the amount of resource allocation / decisions being made by companies rather than individual people. It has changed dramatically since the 1800s.
rayiner 6y ago
> American businesses could have helped outlawed slavery in America. They could have forced the issue onto their politicians. Did they do it? They were instrumental in ending slavery! In the first half of the 19th century, politics was dominated by conflict over the status of slavery in the new territories that were being added to the US. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 held off the civil war for a bit, outlawing slavery in states above the 36th parallel. Over the next 40 years, after the federalists disappeared, business interests in the north mostly belonged to the Whig party. (They had little to no power in the south, which was an agrarian economy where political power rested with landowners, not people whose wealth was built on commerce, finance, or industry.) Whig Presidents compromised with Democrats to maintain the status quo. During that time, Northern industrialists resented the political power of the slave states. On policy issues like tariffs, federal investment in railroads, central banking, etc., northern commercial interests were fundamentally at odds with southern plantation interests. In 1854, Democrats, under President Franklin Pierce, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by leaving it to states to decide whether to have slavery. This led to the anti-Nebraska anti-slavery movement, and violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests in Kansas. The Republican Party was created out of the anti-Nebraska movement. The Republican Party was built on two principles: anti-slavery, and economic modernization. In 1856, Republicans lost the election against James Buchanan. They ran Abraham Lincoln in 1860, on a platform of opposing the expansion of slavery, building a pacific railroad, tariffs, and improving the channels of commerce (harbors, rivers). See: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p.... While Lincoln said he wasn’t going to ban slavery in the southern states—the south feared he would. (Rightfully so, given that the platform called the slave trade “a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age.”) Lincoln’s election precipitated the southern states to secede. Then, of course, there was the civil war. During the civil war, Republicans worked closely with business and financial interests to modernize the economy: https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of-the-civil-war.html https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of.... That paid for the massive military superiority that crushed the south.

arcticbull 6y ago

I guess the question this article asks is what, if anything has changed since the examples you cite.

spoiledtechie 6y ago

I sense your a pretty emotional person and are quite upset at your current economic decision. So lets start with your point. Trickle down economic does work in its truest form. It starts with a person who creates a business. This business makes money through the work it does. The owner gets paid more and decides they can create another business. A business larger with more employees. Overtime, the owner creates many more businesses and employs more. Providing its employees with cash, to spend at restaurants, on boats, on houses, on daycare and many other businesses that the employees like to spend money on. Therefore jump starting more business owners to spend more. This is trickle down economics and its working. I think the thing your upset about is the idea that these business owners, the wealthy are not creating and doing more. I disagree and the US economy would disagree. You simply might just be detached from the economy. So your quite upset about it.

Unesco88 6y ago
Sigh, the fact that garbage like this appears on hackernews is why I can't take US politics seriously. How about some actual research? https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_worth_and_financial_wealth.png https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor... https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Actual_estimated_ideal_wealth_distribution.gif https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Actual_...
Renaud 6y ago
It works as long as the value created in opening more businesses actually trickles down to creating more decently paid jobs. The fact that many people are forced to handle more than one job just to survive shows that part of this argument isn't working. These types of businesses are creating precarity, not wealth for the workers for them to pass on to others.
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
Trickle down does not work period. First of all your usage above is not trickle down. Someone opening a business is not trickle down economics. Trickle down economics is specifically the idea that tax-cuts for the wealthier and highest income earners is more effective for stimulating the economy that tax cuts for poorer and low income earners. And when this concept is studied it is shown to be clearly false. [1] Being against trickle down economics is not "hating businesses", nor being against entrepreneurship, or anything else it's sometimes accused of. Being against trickle down economics is simply promoting the fact that it was a failed theory. The most effective way to stimulate the economy is by giving it to the people with the least income. Whether you want to enact is as your govt policy is a separate question - but here we're simply discussing what is the most effective way to make the economy productive and it's putting it in the hands of lowest income people. The secondary and tertiary effects simply make it the most effective method. Separate from the paper linked above showing the effect of the impact of tax-cuts at different levels of income, there is also a pretty readily available intuition (not in the paper). When people who have little to no money receive tax cuts they spend it. They spend it on food, they spend it on transportation, they spend it in businesses. By spending it in businesses they increase demand which drives opportunities to open new businesses and and increase the labor pool which also drives more demand. When people with high incomes and high wealth receive tax cuts they frequently spent it in inflating valuations of existing assets. Ex real estate goes up and there is more rent seeking (no effect on economic production), stock prices go up (again marginal effect on economic production). Frequently the wealthy already had the money to open a business so a tax cut doesn't actually create as much opportunity to open a business as people imagine. And the market is already at saturation as there has been no increase in available income, so no increase in consumption. An additional dollar available do the poorest eventually makes it to the wealthy after moving through the entire economy via consumption production cycles. A dollar provided to the wealthiest doesn't. It frequently ends up adding a zero to an account, which banks then have to loan out finding more places to invest and you get things like Housing Bubbles, or Softbank, or any other of the many credit bubbles. And finally, quoting the paper's conclusion. > [T]he stimulative effects of income tax cuts are largely driven by tax cuts for the bottom 90% and that the empirical link between employment growth and tax changes for the top 10% is weak to negligible over a business cycle frequency. 1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21035.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w21035.pdf

perl4ever 6y ago

There are places where a "corrupt political and financial system" intersect with China. I was kind of startled to find out that Chinese companies listed in the US are not held to the same standards as those from the US and other countries,[1] because the Chinese government will not allow auditing in the same way. It seems this is a genuine issue and not about xenophobia, even if it gets muddled with it by people who just don't like China. And it is corruption. Threatening to move listings out of the US, while of course it is an option, does not seem (or should not be) relevant to the US changing policies which have been corrupted due to Chinese demands based on "national security". It's about the US fixing its problems, not China per se. It's easy for a casual observer to see the Trump administration saying something and dismiss it, especially as their credibility is so low many news articles are automatically slanted. However, the SEC and PCAOB have some credibility to me. [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-china-exchanges/u-s-must-have-access-to-u-s-listed-chinese-firms-audit-documents-lawmakers-say-idUSKCN1T7060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-china-exchan...

redis_mlc 6y ago
> It's easy for a casual observer to see the Trump administration saying something and dismiss it, especially as their credibility is so low Sure, if you don't know any better. But when you look at the actual facts, Trump often has a more rational and successful approach than his opponents: - stopping travel from China on Jan. 31 due to corona - stopping the absurd postal discount - tariffs on Chinese imports to counter Chinese dumping - stopping Huawei from undermining the world's communications networks Trump doesn't seem so crazy now, does he? Regarding corona, we have an agency that was supposed to be on top of that - the CDC. About all I hear from them is a press interview every 2 months. I hope the next one includes a firing squad for the top 10 CDC officials.

thoughtstheseus 6y ago

Also concerning is the amount of resource allocation / decisions being made by companies rather than individual people. It has changed dramatically since the 1800s.

rayiner 6y ago

> American businesses could have helped outlawed slavery in America. They could have forced the issue onto their politicians. Did they do it? They were instrumental in ending slavery! In the first half of the 19th century, politics was dominated by conflict over the status of slavery in the new territories that were being added to the US. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 held off the civil war for a bit, outlawing slavery in states above the 36th parallel. Over the next 40 years, after the federalists disappeared, business interests in the north mostly belonged to the Whig party. (They had little to no power in the south, which was an agrarian economy where political power rested with landowners, not people whose wealth was built on commerce, finance, or industry.) Whig Presidents compromised with Democrats to maintain the status quo. During that time, Northern industrialists resented the political power of the slave states. On policy issues like tariffs, federal investment in railroads, central banking, etc., northern commercial interests were fundamentally at odds with southern plantation interests. In 1854, Democrats, under President Franklin Pierce, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise by leaving it to states to decide whether to have slavery. This led to the anti-Nebraska anti-slavery movement, and violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests in Kansas. The Republican Party was created out of the anti-Nebraska movement. The Republican Party was built on two principles: anti-slavery, and economic modernization. In 1856, Republicans lost the election against James Buchanan. They ran Abraham Lincoln in 1860, on a platform of opposing the expansion of slavery, building a pacific railroad, tariffs, and improving the channels of commerce (harbors, rivers). See: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p.... While Lincoln said he wasn’t going to ban slavery in the southern states—the south feared he would. (Rightfully so, given that the platform called the slave trade “a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age.”) Lincoln’s election precipitated the southern states to secede. Then, of course, there was the civil war. During the civil war, Republicans worked closely with business and financial interests to modernize the economy: https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of-the-civil-war.html https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-economics-of.... That paid for the massive military superiority that crushed the south.