That was a humdinger of a speech that Hillary Clinton delivered last week, packing more nonsense into a 30-second sound bite than most politicians can manage in an hour-long oration. Speaking at a rally on behalf of Massachusetts’ Democratic gubernatorial nominee Martha Cloakley, which is outrageous enough by itself, Clinton warned an adoring audience “Don’t let anybody tell that, uh, you know, it’s corporations and businesses create jobs,” and added “You know that old theory, ‘trickle down economics,’ that has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”
Hearing such astounding ignorance from a woman widely presumed to be the next president of the United States was alarming enough, and the roar of the crowd was downright dispiriting. Given that it was a Democratic gathering in Massachusetts it is possible than a smaller-than-usual proportion of the crowd held jobs created by corporations and businesses, but even in that bastion of liberalism any crowd anyone anyone who was around in the ’80s should know better than to cheer that tired old trope about the failure of “trickle down economics.” For those too young to have experienced that halcyon age, “trickle down economics” was the derisive nickname that the left attached to President Ronald Reagan’s policies of aggressive tax-cutting and de-regulation and generally getting out of the economy’s way. Instituted after too many desultory years of “stagflation” the policies reduced a runaway inflation rate to a near-optimal level and then set off a record-setting run of economic expansion that lowered the the unemployment while increasing the labor participation rate, boosted median household income, brought down the poverty rate, launched revolutions in consumer electronics and telecommunications and other crucial industries, doubled federal revenues and financed a defense build-up that brought the Cold War to a victorious conclusion, and was agreeable enough to the American that Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid and saw his vice president elevated to the top job four years later. It is true that there were deficits, although the numbers seem quaint by today’s red-ink-soaked standards, and there were all those videos bands with big hair and skinny ties, but it’s hard to see this record as a disaster. All true-believing liberals of the time regarded this as a spectacular failure, however, and have stuck to the story ever since.
Oddly enough, they’ve had considerable success in this effort. “Trickle-down economics” has long been a pejorative, to the point that its adherents insist on “supply side economics” or even “Reaganomics” to avoid the connotations, and by now most people have developed a clear recollection of its spectacular failure. We recall a a fellow patron at a local tavern who was still cursing “trickle down economics” as a failure, and when we recited all the same indices recounted above he said “Yeah? Well, I didn’t get rich,” and a similarly subjective understanding of economic history has given his self-serving theory wide currency. A large portion of the electorate is too young to recall the fall in the inflation rate and the rise is gross domestic product and the rest of what happened in the trickle-down days, and they’ve all been educated by public school teachers who also didn’t get rich in the ’80s, and by now any candidate promoting lower taxes and less regulation and getting out of the economy’s way will surely be be tarred with the slur of “trickle-down economics.”
Mark Twain would probably be sick of hearing it repeated by now, but he famously remarked that “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” and the mis-remembering of “trickle down economics” is an excellent example of the aphorism. There aren’t plenty of them, from the do-nothing policies of Herbert Hoover and how the New Deal ended the Depression to the military defeat America suffered in the Tet Offensive to the black teenagers gunned down on the streets by white racists freed by an uncaring justice system, but the nonsense about “trickle down” economics is especially troublesome. A public gullible enough to believe it is likely to also believe the upcoming narrative about the spectacular success of Obamanomics, and to elect a woman who doesn’t believe that corporations and business create jobs.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 