the only thing that never trickles down is the money

They’ll argue that it’s because of risk and because of their “ideas” but it takes about thirty seconds to see that there’s never a real risk and that there ideas are verifiably awful.

If I made $500k USD a year tax-free, it would take me

2 years to become a millionaire

2000 years to become a billionaire

This is a very simplistic way of looking at personal income, as it doesn’t consider the value of money. You really want to look at PPP (Purchasing Price Parity).

Consider, for instance, the impact that a high rate of inflation has on income and wealth. If you’re living in Chile right now, with an 11% inflation rate, and your income scales with that inflation rate, then you can become a billionaire in 67 years. But, of course, that means costs are exploding as well. So that billion dollars doesn’t feel like a billion dollars 67 years later.

Now consider that we’ve seen the US Stock Market doing an average 14% return over the last 10 years. So that $500k of recurring principle gets you to billionaire status in a mere 58 years. Some of these billionaires are getting ROI at much higher than 14%, thanks to their access to low-interest loans, government contracts, and below-market capital.

What has the US economy actually added over the last decade? What justifies the numerical growth in value? The dirty truth is that “billionaires” are just folks who got to ride the exploding price wave.

There’s no way what billionaires contribute to the world is worth 2000 times more than someone making $500k.

It isn’t a question of contribution but of access to large pools of credit, interest accruing materials, and high return labor. What we have is a new kind of socio-economic enclosure, by which a select few people gain special privileges through social networking. Getting that explosive rate of return on a relatively meager upfront investment propels you into the billionaire class in a short amount of time.

But to get that access, you need social connections. Which is why folks like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could catapult themselves into the billionaire class while you’re still sitting around with your genitals in your hands.

Billionaire is an entirely relative measure. What you can buy with a billion dollars is diminishing at the rate that new billionaires are minted. FFS, you can’t even buy a basketball franchise for a billion dollars anymore.

It 100% works though.

It’s just the point is actually to make the rich richer.

George H W Bush even called it “voodoo economics”. But when he gained the presidency, he continued the practice.

And they always knew right from the start. It was simply a lie.

“spill out” as in the horses poop has undigested oats and the sparrows have to pick through shit for scraps.

Yup. To the point it was utter bullshit, when George Bush Sr. (remember him?) was running against Reagan in 1979, he called the “trickle-down” theory “voo-doo economics”… and he was right. Once it became obvious he wasn’t going to get the nod for President, he was tapped by Reagan who chose him as his running mate, to get him to shut up about it and the rest is history.

I’ve been saying for decades, we’re now in the deep voo-doo doo-doo.

It is. Everytime you hear someone say ‘this is good for the economy’ or ‘our economic growth has slowed down’ or ‘the GDP has grown by suchandsuch percent this year’ they are assuming trickle down economics work. That is because you might have a mental image of the economy being made up of small buiseness owners in your head while in reality ownership of things that benefit from a growing economy is largely in the hands of a small amount of people. In the US for example the top 10% of people own 70% of all of the countries wealth while the bottom 50% own about 1%.

source

Wealthy peoples’ wealth also is made up of investments in company’s to a larger extant than poorer people who have a larger percentage of their wealth made up of cash, houses, cars and other such ‘real’ things which don’t benefit from a good economy. This wealth disparity exists in most countries to varying degrees. Globally speaking it’s even more egregious.