The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.
Interpretation
Trickle-down economics is flawed; claiming that helping the poor harms the economy is misguided.
In this quote, Nick Hanauer critiques the idea of trickle-down economics, which suggests that benefits for the wealthy will eventually benefit everyone else. He argues that the assertion made by some that raising the minimum wage for the poor would negatively impact the economy is not only incorrect, but it also undermines the importance of equitable economic policies that support all levels of society for sustainable growth.
In practice
In a debate about economic policy, one might use this quote to argue against trickle-down economics.
The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.
Raising the minimum wage allows business people to stop thinking about workers simply as costs to be cut and allows you to start thinking about workers as customers to be cultivated.
When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.
If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
No economy can succeed without a high-quality workforce, particularly in an age of globalization and technical change.
Economy consists in a due and proper application of the means afforded according to the ability of the employer and the situation chosen; care being taken that the expenditure is prudently conducted.
My premise is not to tax to destroy the wealth of the wealthy; it's to increase the wealth of the bottom and the middle class.
The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.
Paper money has had the effect in your State that it ever will have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open a door to every species of fraud and injustice.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.
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