"Trickle-Down" Economy is "Whizzing" U.S. Middle Class Out of Existence

The Flush is on With Thinking Like That of Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney

November 29, 2008
By: Dave Rogers

The eminent social scientist and economist Rush Limbaugh was decrying on radio the potential loss of huge bonuses by Wall Street executives and millionaire investors.

According to Mr. Limbaugh, multi-million dollar bonuses are good for the economy, especially in New York, noting that with that "extra" money these investors are able to buy luxury cars.

This gives employment to thousands of Lexus salespersons, auto mechanics, accountants, car wash personnel, etc., underpinning our economy.

I am not making this up. I heard the man say it on the radio! on his 600-station national EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting self-congratulatory network.)

Therefore, the pontificating "Rushbo" claimed, we should all support the current situation in which the rich get richer. Then perhaps a few crumbs will "trickle down" to the rest of us, the only way we peons will have any money at all because we're too stupid to make any ourselves, he theorized.

"How can poor people help build the economy?" screamed Mr. Limbaugh in a triumph of irrational conception. "What can they really contribute?

Lost in his fog of self-aggrandizing superiority is any concept of intelligence or of history. My only response to this fool would be: Who is going to buy the products of the corporations run by the American rich if no one in the U.S. has any money except the rich who make up perhaps one percent of the population?

Perhaps globalization and technology have corrupted the entire body politic as well as the right wing radio whacko "intelligentsia."

Remember, half of Congress thinks the auto industry should be allowed to fail even while they vote immense bailouts for their wealthy friends in the banking "industry."

The extreme poverty, really foolish, reasoning behind this ludicrous idea is doing just that -- creating extreme poverty.

The examples of the destructiveness of "trickle down" economics are too numerous to repeat. Consider just one: wealthy manipulators are given tax breaks to ship American jobs overseas to get rid of pesky unions, thereby putting millions of families into marginal lives of unemployment or service industry under-employment.

And this "thinking" is not new, having progressed from the Ronald Reagan Administration and having been refined by under-lords like one John Engler who set up Michigan with a failing system reeking of arrogance fitted only for the Middle Ages. (For example, don't educate people for jobs, force them to work at McDonald's or Meijer for peanuts.)

Now comes the financial guru of Massachusetts, by way of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one with the silly moniker of "Mitt" Romney. "Let the Auto Industry Go Bankrupt," this gloved sage urged in a column in the New York Times. This is not fantasy, either, the man actually wrote that insane thought for the entire world to read, thereby irrevocably destroying his so-called political future.

I have already written, and will repeat it here, that Mr. Mitt (think Mr. Mop of the TV commercials) would have been lucky to be maitre 'd at a Bloomfield Hills restaurant had it not been for his stalwart father, George, the titan of American Motors.

George was far ahead of the auto world with his small, fuel efficient cars. Sadly, the man was a prophet in his own land, bypassed by the gas guzzling mandarins of the "Big 3" as they headed off the economic cliff.

These conservative thinkers seem intent on convincing their "base" of the rightness of the opinions many already hold: that only the elite should be allowed to thrive. Then those paragons of financial wisdom will decide who among the serfdom will receive a few kernels of popcorn to sustain them in their pitiful hovels in the hinterlands.

Frankly, my dear, there has been nothing like this psycho-social mindset since King Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette in 17th Century France. And you all will recall their fate, I'm sure.