CONNECT
Otherwords / Op-Ed
Published: Monday 27 August 2012
“Congress can’t seem to grasp a basic law of nature: You can't keep a mighty tree alive — much less expect it to thrive — by only spritzing the fine leaves at its tippy-top.”
Percolate-Up Economics
Washington keeps handing massive bailouts to Wall Street giants and multibillion-dollar annual subsidies to Big Oil. Those giveaways certainly boost the 1-percenters' bottom lines, but they do nothing to perk up America's grassroots economy. And that's not only where the rest of us live and work, it's the only place that can generate real national prosperity.
Congress can't seem to grasp a basic law of nature: You can't keep a mighty tree alive — much less expect it to thrive — by only spritzing the fine leaves at its tippy-top. The fate of the whole tree depends on nurturing the roots.
Sadly, America's corporate and political powers today are content to be a bunch of leaf spritzers, blithely oblivious to the dangerous shriveling of the grassroots. To witness the damage they're doing, just look at our nation's desiccated minimum wage.
Set at $7.25 an hour three years ago, its real value has since been gutted by inflation, reducing the wage's current purchasing power to a sub-poverty level of $6.75 an hour. That's only $14,000 a year for full-time work!
Not only would increasing it help hard-working people make ends meet, but it also would provide a direct jolt of nourishment to our overall economy. It's been shown again and again that every dime of a minimum-wage hike is spent by its recipients, circulating upward in our local economies as they increase their purchases of such basics as food, kids' clothing, and health care.
This kind of percolate-up economics works for the many, not just the wealthiest few — and that helps to restore a little bit of moral balance to a society now being torn apart by gross inequality. For more information on raising today's poverty wage, go to www.TimeForARaise.org.
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ABOUT Jim Hightower
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
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By Tara Culp- Ressler
4 comments on "Percolate-Up Economics"
August 30, 2012 3:20pm
Testimonial:
$6.75 is just about what I got paid for my first job, and I was able to buy a car with half of my first paycheck. It took me only two days to find that job. Many single-earner families of three or four lived on that wage, so as a single person, I was doing very well, thank you. And I could point to every Lincoln Continental and Thunderbird that drove by and truthfully say "I built that", as could each of the 5000 others working at that factory.
So why is everyone belly-aching about $6.75? These people must have no Proud, American, Roll-up-the-sleeves, Can-do, Patriotic, willingness to work.
That was 1966 or 1967, and the job was in a car factory near Detroit, and the car I bought was eight years old and burned as much oil as gas at $0. 165 -- yes sixteen and a half cents -- per gallon. The union protected workers from arbitrary bosses. Both the unions and the laws protected workers from raids on the money collected towards pensions.
What -- you claim that things have changed since then? That gasoline costs more than $0.165 / gal? That pension funds are being raided and squandered and gambled away? Ugh! I don't want to hear you talking such ugly stuff. I will shield myself from your un-American, nasty, downbeat world by simply choosing to contine living in the world of 1967, and running your life accordingly.
August 27, 2012 1:27pm
Gush sounds more appropriate than percolate, Jim.
How about:
“Trickle Down - Gush Up”
to describe the today’s economic realities.
August 27, 2012 11:17am
Jim, how about this for an idea, Citizens United stated that corporations are people, let BP, EXXON, Apple and other monster money grubbers print out a 1040K and pay the owed taxes based on income.
August 27, 2012 9:56am
Is there anybody out there that is still proselytizing for "trickle down" economics that ISN'T a paid staffer for romney or ryan or some other republican hack?
I have a better idea; Foundational Economics. this would involve taxing the living hell out of the obscenely wealthy, beginning with mitt "13%" romney, and distributing raw bundles of cash to the most destitute of our neighbors. Eventually, the wealthy would end up with all the money again but in the meantime, you can be damn sure that the poor will spend it, unlike wealthy people, and the ensuing spending spree would be like a direct injection of meth to the economic bloodstream. It couldn't be any worse a system than taxing the hell out of the middle class and turning raw bundles of cash over to those who need it the least and who don't spend enough in this country to sustain a just economy. We can't create a vital economy based on yacht building after all.
I would say what we need is not just a MINIMUM wage, we need a MAXIMUM wage to go with it. That's what taxation is for.
And by the way...... Wouldn't it be nice to see mitt romney's tax returns? Hey! mitt! SHOW US THE TAX RETURNS!