I had no idea the idea was so old!

So you're saying that when the Fox News talking head drags out the Laffer Curve to smuggle into the conversation the assumption that the next round of tax cuts for billionaires will unleash enormous economic growth that net-benefits everyone, he doesn't believe what he's saying?

You know what, you might just be right.

Maybe they don't believe in "trickle-down economics", they same way the do believe that "CRT and DEI are bad". They certainly believe that lowering tax rates raises revenue collected, that's an article of faith. I've see ex-Congressman Joe Walsh advocate for that viewpoint within the last year.

So why all the tax cuts? Sure the GOP are evil bastards who don't believe in it but apparently their voters do.

> No one believes in trickle-down economics. As GP said, it's a pejorative straw man invented by its opponents.

Except the folks that implement it:

> The cuts were based on model legislation published by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),[8][9][10][11] supported by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer,[12] anti-tax leader Grover Norquist,[13] and the influential industrialists Charles and David Koch.[14][15]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment

The term was invented by its opponents, but it was a label that was put on actual policies, like Hoover's:

> In 1932, humorist and social commentator Will Rogers wrote a column criticizing Herbert Hoover's policies and approach to The Great Depression and stated: "The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot."[11] In 2007, political commentator William J. Bennett credited Rogers for coining the term "trickle down" and observed its persistent use throughout the decades since.[12]

And Reagan's:

> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[16] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman", a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[17] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[17][18][19] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[20]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

It is pejorative, but it is not attacking a straw man, but actual policies that right-wing folks want implemented (and have).

"As GP said"

What they said is grossly dishonest, disingenuous, and incoherent. "pejorative straw man" is nonsensical. "trickle down economics" is, by your own accounting, a pejorative term for "supply side economics", but they refer to the exact same thing, and it's the thing that TFA argues only helps the rich. And since people do "believe in" supply side economics, they believe in trickle down economics since that is the exact same thing but given a name that is pejorative (and rightly so).

Neither of you has or can offer any defense of the policies that go by either name, or a rebuttal of TFA.

I have a thing about bad faith or such inept argumentation that it appears to be, so I won't respond further.

"Supply-side economics" is a technocratic rebranding of trickle-down economics, adding just enough nuance to force the draw rhetorically while advocating policy that is completely indefensible to anyone who has enough time to properly examine the nuance.

You just said trick-down wasn't a real thing so how can you say it's different from supply-side?

What's the actual difference, because you haven't actually supplied one. You've just said "They're different. One is a thing, and one is a criticism of a thing".

So, does the criticism not hold value? Because a large part of "supply-side economics", a term coined in the 70s, is reduction of taxes and regulations. With the idea that that extra capital will then be used to create jobs.

And if that is not what's happening, then I don't care about the semantics of whether or not "trickle-down" is the appropriate term of art to be applied here. The core concept of "giving rich people more money spurs job growth" is apparently false.

I mean, one is a name of a policy used by supporters, and the other is another name of the same policy used by critics? Name an actual difference?

> I don't know regex

You know enough about it to misidentify that obvious string replacement command as an example of it.

Your comments are incoherent and disingenuous. Saying that trickle down economics is "an entirely pejorative term created by detractors of supply-side economics" is very much saying that they refer to the same thing ... and it's the thing they refer to that TFA argues only helps the rich. You say that "the policies of supply-side economics, however, are much more defensible" but you offer no defense, and no rebuttal to TFA.

> For example, the Cartesian circle does not refer to any of the many mathematical advancements Rene Descartes discovered. Instead, it's the name of a common criticism for an argument he made.

This is the most inept attempt at an analogy that I can recall seeing.

I have a thing about people who act in bad faith, or argue so ineptly that it looks like it ... I won't be responding further.

> Tax the Walton family, or the highest earning employees directly, and you get to have your cake and it too since you get similar amounts of tax revenue without damaging the economy nearly as much

They do get taxed same as everyone else, more even. What’s not taxed though is the stocks which never get materialized into cash and grow in value because of the low corporate tax rate that makes them more profitable.

> But the reality is that when you tax corporations, that is one of the most economically damaging taxes you can do

That’s a rhetorical jump you made. Corporations benefit from the government creating order and structure just like everyone else. They have a legal system they can use to settle disputes and protect themselves. They have solid roadway networks that help their employees get to work and to transport their goods. They get a military that protects their goods in transit to/from foreign lands. They get a police force that ensures that people don’t destroy their property. It’s only damaging if the value provided to all corporations is less than the tax rate is, but claiming any tax is damaging is laughable on its face. And that’s ignoring all the other kinds of non-monetary value the government grants corporations (eminent domain, water rights, suppression of various regulations, etc)

You can't do that, because the Walton family and others are really, really good at avoiding getting taxed. Even small business owners like my uncles do whatever they can to avoid any sort of taxes. I never paid VAT on sport equipments or DIY equipment, which are what they sold, but we also managed for my whole school life to avoid paying VAT on school supplies, and it's probably the same for my 22 cousins. Tax avoidance is a really good hobby for those people.

I've been reading about the US progressive era of 100 years ago and I am seeing from Robber Barons many of the same arguments that I heard growing up from my Reagan-worshipping parents. It's both frustrating and encouraging to know that we soundly defeated these at one point before the pendulum swung back. They didn't invent a new pack of lies, they just put the old one in the microwave and gave it 30 seconds.

I suspect that were I to learn about the industrial revolution I would find that the US Robber Barons didn't invent their talking points either and that they simply took British Industrialist talking points and, err, gave them 3 minutes on the stove.

That's quite funny. I recall several people not even responding but just silently staring at the proponent. Other bad ideas (like privatization) were adopted by repeating opposing talking points.

OBBB Opportunity Zones? Bonus depreciation? If you are unfamiliar with these or their applications to tax avoidance, you are outing yourself as a wagie running defense for your economic betters.

When did the previous tax cuts get rolled back vs getting extended in perpetuity?

TCJA made changes to corporate capital gains, no?

As for tax hikes <90%, this hasn’t occurred in income; the opposite has occurred. You could make the case that it hasn’t been worth it for the poorest brackets though, given other coincident policy changes

Yeah, but that's hard. Taking lunch money from the poors is much easier.

> All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs

Is that actually true? Maybe I'm being dense right now but that's not completely apparent to me.

More abundance per person does seem generally better (albeit there's eventually diminishing marginal utility), but that's not the same thing as society as a whole producing more with less labor.

Maybe "all else being equal" is the operative condition here, like assuming that the economy would be able to absorb newly freed labor into new economic activity?

You can also optimize some good things out of existence in this manner, and it's still not clear that robots are going to be able to swoop in and save that kind of newly uneconomical activity, at least within my lifetime.

> All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs.

I'm not sure how to work with the "all else being equal" part. I suspect it's a way to get out of dealing with the truth of the situation, but feel free to expand on it.

But.. to the main point: "you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs" <- the owner of the business does, yes. But unemployment statistics and in general "labour" wants the opposite.

Let's take this to an extreme. Take all the business owners in the land and make them so efficient they only need employ themselves. "Productivity" remains the same, but now the bulk of the inhabitants of the land are unemployed, and can't buy the "products". So now the owners make no money and go bankrupt. And no-one has work. And there's no productivity.

I think what "you" really want (and by "you" I mean "we") is for business owners to make only the slightest margin of profit possible (after paying themselves) to keep their businesses running and to employ as many people as possible, who all get paid as close as possible to the owner; and for any left-over to be reinvested in new businesses with the same approach to paying staff. That way more people have a job, more people are "productive" and more people can buy the stuff made by the companies.

Sure, this is a ridiculous extreme, but it makes more sense to me than "you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs". I am curious though: is there an equally impractical and extreme story that works to bolster your argument, to help me see the pattern more clearly?

That's true to a certain degree, but there's a labor supply factor involved too. If companies are rewarded for employing more people it lowers the available supply of labor forcing companies to create a more enticing environment to attract that labor (prices, benefits, etc).

It compounds if the incentive is aimed at domestic labor.

> All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs.

So what incentive structure would you suggest? How do you prevent the concentration of wealth that results from a business raking in millions of dollars per employee?

> All else being equal, you want to produce more with less labor and other inputs.

And firms are already incentivised to increase productivity, including by offshoring jobs or replacing staff by robots, because that's their profit margin. And in this case we're not concerned with firms reducing costs in general, but firms substituting capital for labour. This was an improvement for agriculture, but it was an improvement because that labour found more productive things to do...

But if you're a government those decisions businesses make don't help unless the robots or Chinese factories are considerably more efficient at making stuff than domestic labour, because a business decision that at the margin spending a dollar less on domestic labour and 99 cents more on another production input is very slightly more efficient loses the government more in income tax receipts than it gains on anything else, and usually adds to their benefit bill. Also, people don't like their jobs being replaced. (And yet ironically, tax structures are often more favourable to companies increasing the capital input and decreasing the labour input...)

Obviously it's true that you can go too far and end up subsidising firms to keep on employees that aren't doing anything useful, but relatively minor tax breaks which mainly advantage low margin retail businesses don't do that, and they're not going to stop NVIDIA being NVIDIA either. But they might make the $45k outsourcing contract not look a substantially better deal than retaining the $50k employee.

But this is precisely how you get these large wealth gaps in society. Not like the 1% vs the bottom 50%, but the bottom 50% vs the top 30%.

That "high efficiency" is actually "less humans in the loop".

Compare something like money managing to car manufacturing. A team of money managers might clear $1B+ in revenue for a year with a team of 200. To clear $1B a yr selling cars, you need workers and supply chains that are tens of thousands of workers deep. It's the very inefficiency of manufacturing goods that makes it so attractive to workers.

This problem is inherent and intractable, but the natural order is to whither away the inefficient parts and only keep the most functional ones.

For those reading closely, this is also how you get a begrudged "coastal elite" and populist presidents like Trump (tariffs, anti-immigrants, state backed industry) elected. They want suffering for the offices of 200 people bringing in billions, and a return of the massive factories and supply chains with tens of thousands being the ones brining in billions.

That's an interesting view though.

If Walmart employees somebody who's part time and is on Medicaid are they on Medicaid because of Walmart or because they couldn't commit to enough hours to go full time? 9% of 1.6 million employees on Medicaid means they are employing over 1.4 million people who are not on Medicaid, all of whom are taxed for income, payroll, property, sales, etc.

If Walmart decided tomorrow to terminate all employees who were collecting Medicaid so that they could avoid a tax increase for that stat would it be a good thing? Is it better for a company to avoid hiring at all, even part time, if they can't fully purge the employee from government assistance?

Yeah, I intentionally referenced the Laffer curve. Essentially I think folks use it to only argue for less taxes, but I think it applies both ways.

I mean that's definitely cherry picking portions of the wiki. Both of the articles refer to each other much more than those examples, not that that really matters.

Plus the Supply Side Economics wiki article, right below the "Not to be confused with trickle-down economics", contains a huge box pointing out the many issues with the article, including but not limited to "Needs more academic or scholarly research, rather than newspaper articles." and "contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information."

I also was trying to google it and saw what the other commenter saw btw. The AI overview on Google says "Yes, they refer to the same core economic concept, but supply-side economics is the formal, academic term, while trickle-down economics is a popular and critical label for it. Both argue that cutting taxes and reducing rules for businesses and rich people will help the whole economy". And it references: https://mattbruenig.com/2013/01/07/on-trickle-down-economics... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://study.com/learn/lesson/video/demand-side-vs-supply-s... https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/glossary_term/supply-side...

What is the difference between how trickle-down economics is portrayed vs. the actual ideas of supply-side economics? You have to specify how / in what way it's a strawman