Originally Posted by BigLouie
The message intended to be conveyed by that chart conflates a couple of disparate issues.
The term "trickle-down" economics is generally understood to revolve around arguments that cutting taxes on the very affluent encourages capital formation and business investment, thereby increasing production and employment. Leaving aside arguments concerning whether under certain sets of circumstances that may or may not be true, tax cuts have little to do with the rapidly rising levels of income and wealth disparity over the last forty years. That resulted primarily from other factors. In fact, summing up all the tax code and rate changes from 1981-2003, taxes have been cut
far more for the middle class than for the top one percent.
The difference between total taxes currently paid by the top one percent and what they would be under the tax code of 1979 is a fraction of 1% of GDP. On the other hand, the total amount paid by all the rest is several percentage points of GDP lower relative to what it would be under the 1979 code and bracket structure.
Therefore, you can easily see that the net result of tax policy over the last 30 years should be expected to have primarily provided "demand-side" stimulus, not "supply-side" effects. In fact, it does not differ significantly from the typical neo-Keynesian prescription of putting more money into the hands of non-affluent consumers so that aggregate demand is boosted.
But that obviously is not working well. I have long maintained that the problem arises from structural issues which are not being addressed. In the generation following World War II, we produced almost everything we consumed. We were a manufacturing and exporting colossus. In fact, the U.S. had pretty much of a free ride for about a quarter-century prior to the early 1970s, since so much of what would have been the industrial capacity of our global competitors had been bombed away.
But in recent years, a growing share of the "demand" we created has leaked right out of the country. One might reasonably ask, "Demand for what? More crap imported from Asia and sold at Walmart?"
If we continue to run huge fiscal deficits that have to be eventually financed with endless rounds of money-printing, and if we compound the problem by continuing to run massive trade and balance-of-payments deficits, our economy will never return to the robust levels of growth we enjoyed in the past.