Krugman: Trump abandons trickle-down for upside-down
By Paul Krugman / The New York Times
Bring back voodoo economics!
I never thought I’d say that. But Donald Trump has managed something remarkable: He’s making traditional right-wing economic nonsense look relatively sensible in retrospect.
Ever since the rise of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been vocal believers in the magical power of tax cuts for the rich. The idea was that if you reduced tax rates at the top, “job creators” would respond with a surge of productive energy, boosting the economy — hence trickling down to the middle class — and maybe even reducing the budget deficit.
This idea wasn’t unadulterated nonsense. Rather, it was adulterated nonsense. It described something that could happen in principle but doesn’t happen in practice; tax cuts never produced the promised economic surge, tax hikes never had the predicted destructive effects. Still, it remained party orthodoxy, largely because rich people put their money behind a doctrine that called for cutting their taxes.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/krugman-trump-abandons-trickle-down-for-upside-down/