Amanduh tackles effective demand
And the result ain’t pretty:
If the goal is to help working people do better — as opposed to helping rich people buy diamond-encrusted water bowls for their dogs — then it’s critical to keep fully funding programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps.
“When you give people money to spend on food or to go out to get health care, then that money is directly being spent on the economy,” explained Kate Bahn, an economist for the Center for American Progress, in a phone conversation.
Conservatives have long argued for “trickle-down” economics, saying that hefty tax cuts for the rich will lead to more investment and more jobs. Instead, it tends to lead to more conspicuous and gratuitous consumption.
But it’s still consumption, isn’t it honey? Which affects demand the same way…..
“In reality, economic growth in the United States since World War II has tended to be greater in times with relatively high top marginal income tax rates,” policy analysts Alexandra Thornton and Harry Stein wrote in a 2015 paper for the Center for American Progress, citing multiple studies analyzing the relationship between tax rates and economic growth.
Sigh. A result that relies upon the manner in which high post-WWII growth happened to coincide both with the rest of the world’s economy having been bombed flat and high tax rates to pay the debt from said war.