"Trickle Down Trickles Up Again"

Some of you may not have heard, but in the last few years it's become clear that she's made what appears to be a 180 degree turn from her left-baiting personna. We can use her eloquence.

This morning Arianna Huffington describes the Bushies' latest economic relief program: more tax cuts for the rich, or "Trickle Down Trickles Up Again."

How did the free-market ideology of the Reagan revolution come to be the political consensus of our times? How did we get suckered by the fairy tale that as long as people kept shopping, the market could keep our prosperity going as far as the eye could see? And that by voting with our credit cards, we could spread the gospel of prosperous democracy to any corner of the earth where American products were made or consumed. Like all fairy tales, it's a nice story. But it's time to acknowledge that this one didn't have a happily-ever-after ending.

....

It would take a while -- and the fall of Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Sam Waksal, et al -- before the invisible hand was exposed as a pickpocket. But even after the free market parade had to be called off on account, not of rain, but of fraud, we have begun to hear the trickle-down marching bands warming up in the distance, ready to play their familiar siren songs. It's time we resuscitated Mark Russell's definition of trickle-down as "something that benefits David Rockefeller now and Jay Rockefeller later." Or, to be a bit more current, George Herbert Walker Bush then, and George Walker Bush now.

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Published on September 6, 2002 2:19 PM.

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