Introduction

A word about the title. In one of his concert films, the late Richard Pryor talks about his cocaine addiction. Jim Brown, a football player, intervenes and asks, "What ya gonna do?" Pryor tries to justify his habit. Brown keeps repeating, "What ya gonna do?"

Well, Pryor didn't do anything. Shortly afterward, he set himself on fire (accidentally or on purpose, there's no way to be certain). He spent several painful months in a burn ward.

This blog will be, among other things, an occasional look at some of the addictive and potentially dangerous ideas in American politics. We've already been burned by some of them, and unless something changes, we'll get burned again and again.

My nominee for most addictive idea is that the wealthy somehow deserve a break from the rest of us. It begins with someone arguing for "trickle-down" economics (or whatever they're calling it this year), which is nothing more than a simple "bait and switch" con. Bait and switch works because it's simple and it plays on greed.

Here's the scam. Someone approaches you with a wallet or bag containing money and claims to have found it. He or she would be happy to split it with you if you'll just put up some money for "security." That's the bait part. If the two of you find the original owner, you get your security back; if not, you get your security and half the money. You can't lose.

You go to the bank and withdraw your security money. Your new friend puts it in the bag. After a while he hands you the bag and tells you he's going to look for the owner, or contact the police, or use the bathroom--anything to get away from you. That's right, this is the switch part, and you're "left holding the bag." During that brief time between your putting your money in the bag and his handing you the bag, he has switched bags on you. When you get nervous enough to look inside, you find only scrap paper.

What does that have to do with tax breaks? Remember that the government's money belongs to everybody, including you (that's oversimplifying, so we'll cover it later). The bait in this case is jobs. We hear that if we allow wealthy people and corporations to keep more wealth, they will invest it and stimulate the economy. In an ideal world, it might work. In the real world, it doesn't. Just in America, we've tried it about twenty times, and not once has it worked as advertised. That's the switch: they promise to use your money to help you, but they only help themselves. An individual who gets conned ought to know better, but as a country, we've fallen for it every time. One definition of insanity is repeating behavior and expecting a different outcome.

I have two main objections to cutting taxes for the wealthy. One, they've already gotten ample rewards from the economic system. There is absolutely no reason for them to get further rewards from the political system. On the contrary, as the ultimate beneficiaries of society, they have a vested interest in maintaining that society. Over the last three decades, they have made short-sighted decisions that have instead harmed society: sending jobs overseas, keeping wages flat, adding profit motives to the health-care system, discouraging union activity, repealing consumer protections, and starving government of funds for things like infrastructure, education, and research. All these strategies have weakened our country as a whole, simply to make the wealthy even wealthier. The government should have stopped every one of these schemes as a matter of national interest.

Two, the other part of the argument is that the wealthy somehow know best how to invest. Two words: Bernie Madoff. The wealthy are at least as gullible, if not more so, than anybody else. Where were the responsible investors who should have researched instruments like collateralized debt obligations, realized they were bogus, and told everyone not to buy them? Why did anyone ever buy a "junk bond"? How many people gave their money to Madoff simply because everyone else was doing it? And Madoff is by no means an isolated case.

The whole "invisible hand" idea of capitalism relies on diffusion, not concentration, of wealth. As in politics, the more people we have making decisions, the better those decisions turn out to be in the aggregate. Yes, some people lose money, but with more people handling smaller shares of wealth, the risk is spread out. We have seen this idea turned on its head, with more and more wealth flowing into fewer and fewer hands. For instance, in 1980, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 7 percent of the wealth. Today that same 1 percent owns 20 percent of the wealth. The capitalists are destroying capitalism.

The 1890s version of the trickle-down scam used the "horse and sparrow" analogy. You feed a horse oats, they pass through its digestive system, and sparrows eat the leftovers. Think how many sparrows you could feed with those oats if you bypassed the horse entirely. That's what happened in the 1940s, when the New Deal got a chance to work. Ordinary lower- and middle-class people were able to go to college, get good jobs, and spend money. The result was the longest and strongest economic expansion in human history. Apparently the capitalists considered that a bad thing, because they set about reversing everything the New Deal accomplished. Part of that reversal, of course, included tax cuts for the wealthy.

Here's another point nobody talks about: when exactly does this trickling down reach the rest of us? After three decades of helping the wealthy, shouldn't the economy be doing well? Instead we have the worst conditions since the Great Depression. But the wealthy are doing better than ever. They don't need a break. The rest of us do.