The Powell manifesto or memorandum set the stage for Ronald Reagan to support supply-side trickle-down economics. Famously, Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That was a bedrock part of the right-wing movement that emerged in the United States. It still is very important.
The idea was to put in place policies, particularly tax policies, that would benefit primarily the wealthy, and then the money spent by the wealthy would trickle down to those with less wealth and all would benefit. In time. This economic theory has since been largely discredited, except by people like Donald Trump and his friends who benefit greatly from those policies. Benefits to the wealthy are obvious. Benefits to the less wealthy are much harder to find. Naturally, people like the wealthy have been quick to find the benefits. It is hard not to like something that benefits you.
Thanks to the vast network of right-wing organizations however, these views have been so widely promulgated that that even those who don’t benefit from them are frequently heard arguing in favor of them. People like Senko’s father The Brain Washing of my Dad.
Studs Terkel said in the 1990s, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is meanness.” Jeff Cohen, also interviewed by Jen Senko in the film was a professor of Journalism at Ithaca College, and he said by that Terkel meant, the kind of Country Club cronies “looking down on the less fortunate”. Cohen said, people like Russ Limbaugh tried to get white middle-class males as angry at vulnerable groups in the film as some people did in country clubs in the 1950s. Terkel meant that this mean streak was what was disseminated in the 1980s.
Someone else said, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is the rich pissing on the middle class.” The reality was that money was taken from the middle class and given to the rich.
Ronald Reagan, we must remember, was the one who brought us the expression, “Make America Great Again,” that was later adopted by Donald Trump. Reagan advocated for a return to a simpler time, a mythic time, when white males were in control, unencumbered by worries about others such as black Americans, gay, lesbians, and when Evangelical Christians did not have to worry about catering to other religious groups such as Muslims. They could be safely ignored. Donald Trump has tried the same thing, with a lot of success.
According to Claire Connor, author of Wrapped in the Flag,
“they saw America of 1900 as the apex of when we were great as a nation. 1900. Before the income tax. Before the fed. Before any progressive legislation was considered or passed. Before child labor laws. Before women had any rights. Before women even had the right to vote.”
According to Connor, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society,
“talked a lot about 1900, as this glorious time in American history, and he said, ‘there were pockets of poverty, but it was a healthy kind of poverty. Poverty free from government interference where every man understood that relief from dire want was entirely his own responsibility. Thus the blessings of liberty outweighed the poverty.”
Ronald Reagan, known as the Great Communicator, said this:
“Looking back, we lived in poverty or pretty close to that all the time, but we didn’t know that at the time, because the government didn’t come around and tell us that we were poor.”
As Rick Perlstein said,
“Conservatives were all about balanced budgets. They were all about making people eat their spinach. They came up with this new theory called ‘Supply-side Economics.’ And Supply side means basically that you give money to business and that way they’ll produce more plenty that will trickle down to ordinary people. And it was what George H. W. Bush in 1980 who called this “voodoo economics” because it sounded like magic. It was like he was promising you the candy store. He said he could lower everybody’s taxes and by doing so everybody would benefit. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In actual fact how it turned out was hurting the very working-class voters who trusted Ronald Reagan with their economic future. Of course, inequality just sky-rocketed. The rich got richer and the wages of ordinary people just stagnated.”
It did after all, sund like magic. And people wanted it to be true. So they did not demand evidence. In fact, the message was so powerful that Donald Trump used the same discredited claims to sell his tax cuts that mainly benefited the wealthy during his first presidency and again, most recently, in the second. And once again, poor people, who were not getting the breaks, got screwed again.
Funny how that happens.
